LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



i^ait.,---- - inju|ri3i^t "^a, 

Shelf iS'.3.S B 

CNITEB STATES OF AMERICA. 




Fac-simile from the picture in the possession of his great-grandson, the Rev. William J. Seabury, D. D. 



MEMOIR 



CONCERNING 



THE SEABURY COMMEMORATION 



HELD AT 



ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL. LONDON 



THE FOURTEENTH DAY OF NOVEMBER, A. D. 1884 



PRINTED CHIEFLY FROM A MANUSCRIPT MONOGRAPH INTRO- 
DUCTORY TO A UNIQUE VOLUME IN THE POSSESSION 



GEORGE SHEA 
H 



THE PAGES OF WHICH ARE INSET WITH ALL THE ORIGINAL 

CORRESPONDENCE AND OTHER PROOF OF 

THAT HISTORICAL EVENT 












BOSTON AND NEW YORK / / -'? /- O "2^ 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANT /i > > ^ ^^^^ 

1893 






Copjmght, iSgif. 
By GEORGE SHEA. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. O. Houghton & Ca 



ContentjS 



L 



PAGH 



IKENESS of Bishop Seabury : facsimile of Sharp's 
engraving from the painting by Duche. The original 
portrait is at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecti- 
cut ....... Frontispiece 

Memoir of the subject of this book . . . . 7-33 

Letter from Charles Wordsworth, Bishop of St. An- 
drews, to George Shea 39 

Letter to Dean Church, and the advisory monograph, 
enclosed therein, prepared at suggestion of Canon 
Liddon, and sent in triplicate to the Archbishop of 
Canterbury, Dean Church and Canon Liddon 40-51 

Letter from Dean Church to George Shea, and the 
note, enclosed therein, from the Archbishop . 51? 52 

Letters from Assistant Bishop Henry Codman Potter 
to George Shea 52, 54 

Letter from George Shea to Bishop Horatio Potter 52-53 

Letters from Canon Liddon to George Shea 54-55, 59-60 

Letters from George Shea to Dean Church 40-51, 55-56 

Letters from Dean Church to George Shea 51, 56, 57-58 

Psalms, Lessons and Collects selected by Canon 
Liddon specially for the occasion . . . '57 

Letter from W. J. Seabury to George Shea . 58-59 

^he " interpolated " title-page to the " form of 
Service" 61 

Sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury . . 63-82 



4 Contents! 

Chart of Episcopal Successions from a. d. 1518 to 
A. D. 1887, by Rev. W. J. Seabury, D. D. . . 84 

The " Concordat " between the Scotch Bishops and 
Bishop Seabury 85-89 

Extract from Register at Lambeth Palace relating 
to the " Scots Episcopacy as connected with the 
English Episcopacy " 90 

List of the Consecration and Succession of Bishops 
so far as that of Seabury is concerned . . 91-97 

Certificate by the " Scots Bishops " to Bishop Sea- 
bury of his consecration 98 



jHemotr 



MARK, NOW, HOW A PLAIN TALE SHALL PUT THEE DOWN." 
Admonition to Falstaff, 

Henry IV., Part I., Act II., Scene 4. 



x:^ 



I 



u 



Vintit vzvita& 

To record the true history and to preserve the 
evidences of a great event in our ecclesiastic 
progress I write this essay. 

On Trinity Sunday, a. d. 1884, I was in Oxford, 
England ; and, on the afternoon of that day, called 
upon Canon Liddon at Christ Church. I arrived the 
day before at Liverpool from New York. On my 
way to London, I stopped at Oxford to confer with him 
on a subject which occupied my thought very much : 
in which I desired to interest him; and, through 
him. Canon Gregory, his senior associate canon at 
St. Paul's Cathedral. I had known Dr. Liddon since 
the early part of the summer of 1870, from that 
time had often enjoyed his hospitality, and was fre- 
quently his correspondent. On coming to Christ 
Church I went directly, and unannounced, to his 
rooms; in response to my knock it chanced that 
he himself, being alone, came to the outer door. 
Kindly recognizing me, he, in that hearty manner 
which he indulged towards some friends when his 
natural shyness had worn away, took my hand 
warmly in both of his, and led me into the interior 
room — his study. I had evidently interrupted him 
at work. He afterwards mentioned, in excuse for 



8 0Lzmoiv concerning tl^e 

not asking me to spend the evening with him, that 
he had been preparing the customary discourse 
which he delivered each Sunday evening in term- 
time to a selection of students. When we were 
seated, I, without delay, began by telling him that 
my visit at this time had more purpose than only a 
friendly call: for I wished to consult him about a 
special service which I was convinced should be 
held, and in St. Paul's Cathedral, upon the occa- 
sion, which would occur the coming autumn, of 
the centennial anniversary of the consecration of 
Samuel Seabury by the Scotch Bishops. Canon 
LiDDON said he was acquainted with the memorable 
event itself and its importance, and was conscious 
of the misconceived policy, influenced by political 
prejudices, which justified Seabury in seeking con- 
secration of the Scotch Church ; but declared that 
he needed more information, and feared that others 
he should have to consult were no better instructed 
than himself. What he said was to that effect. 
This was not unforeseen by me: because I had 
often before found how little certainty of know- 
ledge even those who were most friendly in Eng- 
land to The Church in America had of its history, 
or of our national affairs or polity. Yet Canon 
LiDDON had more information of those subjects 
than many others of our Anglican well-wishers. 
Nevertheless, upon this apparent invitation from 
him I developed my motives at full and most ear- 
nestly; first alluding to the commemorative cele- 



^eaburr Commemoration 9 

bration then preparing by the Scotch Church to 
be held at Aberdeen on October 5-8. I tried to 
explain that this could not meet the " opportunity " 
which it seemed to me the anniversary offered to 
The Church of England, and to her alone. I then 
alluded to the consecrations at Lambeth of Bishops 
White and Provoost, and to the probability, if my 
suggestion was not acted upon, that those Angli- 
can consecrations would be commemorated as the 
most important events, and become as if admittedly 
the primal and true initiative of the American epis- 
copate. To allow this error to be asserted would, 
I suggested, be simply unhistorical, and, also, once 
more evince the weakness of 1 784 ; but that a com- 
memoration at St. Paul's, of the Aberdeen "fact," 
would be an acknowledgment and a sanction of the 
Scotch consecration, and would asseverate the in- 
dependence of The Church from affairs essentially 
those of civil discord, and bring at once into a 
manifestation and declaration of unity the Churches 
of Scotland, England, and America. Let me be 
entirely candid, I said; our purpose should be to 
subordinate all other things attending the event to 
the object of bringing those churches together on 
November 14, under the dome of the Metropolitan 
Cathedral of St. Paul's, and thereby to declare 
their unity, and the heroic act of Seabury and of 
the three Scotch Bishops. Strifes of the State 
need never be causes for schisms in the Church. I 
added, that the thought of such a celebration so far 



lo a^emofr concerning tl^e 

was entirely my own ; and, indeed, was mainly the 
motive for my present visit to Europe ; that it had 
not been suggested to me by any one ; and that I 
meant it to be wholly individual,^ because then the 
matter could be considered without embarrassment. 
If nothing came of my suggestion, it need not be- 
come known to others, and no cause for offence 
could arise. But I earnestly dwelt upon the thought 
that the significance of the demonstration would 
have a depth and certainty of purport and an influ- 
ence beyond what we could now foresee or calcu- 
late ; and, in conclusion, I ventured to say that the 
anniversary and its appropriate celebration could be 
fitly made " a Day of Atonement." This is the 
substance of my response to Canon Liddon ; and 
this relation contains many phrases which I uttered. 
Canon Liddon still encouraging me, I continued 
to develop the subject more and more and into de- 
tails for the commemorative service, till the afternoon 
was far gone ; and till it appeared to us that the pro- 
ject -was .sufficiently considered for our own prelimi- 
nary iises.' He promised finally, that he would call, 
in London, upon Canon Gregory, as Canon Gregory 
was to be during November in residence; and he 
repeated that they would have to depend on me 
for the historical particulars. From this request, 
repeated, I engaged to write a memoir^ covering 

1 Appendix, pp. 42, 53. 

2 The memoir, written by me after my return to New York, will be 
seen in Appendix, pp. 41-51. 



^eaburt Commemoratton n 

the affair, its circumstances, and some of its effects ; 
for at that time I was hoping that he might be the 
preacher ; afterwards I was convinced that he would 
have favorably entertained the proposal. 

It interests me to recall — it may interest many 
others to learn of — incidents which occurred at 
this remarkable interview. The current of our after 
conversation carried us to reminiscences of Pusey, 
Keble, and Newman. On the mantel-piece before 
us in the study was a miniature bust of Newman. 
Pusey died since I was last at Oxford. After a 
while I asked Canon Liddon how he got on with 
the " Life of Pusey." He replied — and it appeared 
to me sadly — that he had given it up; but hoped 
to find another hand to which it might be com- 
mitted. To bring into two volumes all that should 
be written — which w^ould, he said, be necessary to 
ensure the work being read — he had found required 
efforts to which his strength was not equal. The 
subject and its relations, he remarked, grew on him, 
and the need for terseness throughout the work 
was absolute. I felt that a great disappointment was 
to fall upon the religious and the literary worlds, 
and promptly responded : Then publish the manu- 
script in its present state, and let the work not be 
finished by any other writer. The subject of Pusey 
and his times itself is interesting, but most so to 
a generation which is nearly passed away: the 
present takes little interest in it; and you yourself 
know and feel that the name of Pusey is not 



12 ittemoir concerning tl^e 

always acceptable to a large number of our church- 
folk. Your own desire is that Pusey shall become 
truly known and justly esteemed. Your name as 
the author is required to win a successful circula- 
tion, certainly in America ; and there you will have 
a multitude of readers in and outside our own com- 
munion. I spoke to that effect, and generally those 
phrases were used by me. I thought I might have 
given offence ; but, after a few moments' silence and 
apparently of reflection, he arose, opened one of the 
drawers in one of the library tables, and, taking in 
his hand three or four packages of manuscript, 
folded in oblong, told me they were chapters of 
the " Life of Pusey," and were as far as he had 
finished. It appeared to me that a great deal of 
work was accomplished. He then opened another 
drawer, and placed in my hand a package: this 
was of a large number of letters. They were the 
originals of correspondence between Pusey and 
Newman. He said that he was indebted to the 
Cardinal himself for them. Whether he told me 
that these letters were received through Dean 
Church, or I supposed that they were, I am not 
able to recollect. I was aware — as who is not 
who knew either of them.'* — of the life-long and 
affectionate friendship between Church and New- 
man. I read none, indeed I opened none, of the 
letters. Canon Liddon became very animated as 
he mentioned that they would shed "a welcome 
light" upon the thoughts, motives, and actions of 



^tahmv Commemoration 13 

the men of the Tractarian Movement. As he 
replaced the packages in the drawers he said: 
"Will you come with me? I hope we can get 
into St. Friedswide's. We have enough time be- 
fore I must meet the scholars." As we passed 
out into the quadrangle of Christ Church the twi- 
light was already deepening. Canon Liddow got 
the key at one of the offices; we continued on 
our way to the entrance of the Abbey Church, 
where he unlocked and opened the " wicket." Our 
conversation ceased. I followed. We soon stood 
at the foot of the slab which, in the middle aisle, 
covers the grave of Pusey. With closed eyes he 
remained a few moments in recollections or silent 
prayer. Keble, Newman, Pusey, Church, Liddon, 
and others of that remarkable consociation, were 
truly of a brotherhood of love and devotion, and 
more than one incident has evinced that, with them, 
theological adversities could not supersede the sin- 
cerities due to ancient friendship. Canon Liddon 
and I went up to and I sat in the stall in the chan- 
cel where Pusey sat during public services, and 
where he always used the Testament in the Greek 
tongue ; and thence we proceeded to the pulpit from 
which he delivered (May, 1843) the sermon for 
which he was, as for heresy, suspended from preach- 
ing for two years. During this part of our visit 
Canon Liddon was even more animated and very 
communicative. I perceived that the theme of 
Pusey was losing none of its influence over his 
mind and heart. 



14 iKlemoir concerning tj^e 

We walked together toward the gateway under 
the great tower, and as we neared it he directed 
my attention to a Httle doorway on our left and in 
that corner of the quadrangle. That doorway led 
to the apartments which Pusey occupied during 
his latter years, and there he died in an upper cham- 
ber. It was from the window of that chamber 
that WoLSEY watched and directed the dilapidation 
of the lower part of the nave of St. Friedswide's, 
to make larger space for the construction of what 
was to be known as The Cardinal's College. I 
had met Pusey, in 1870, at the inauguration of 
Keble College; and we had afterwards written 
communications with each other. Canon Liddon 
came with me to the street in front of the tower; 
again, in that familiar way of which I have spoken, 
he took my right hand in both of his, and said: 
I shall not abandon it ; you have given me reasons ; 
I shall try to finish my work. Those were his very 
words, I think : surely it was what he said to me. I 
did not speak. I could not. There and then we 
parted. I walked quickly to the High Street. I 
did not look back ; I felt as if he yet stood where 
we had parted. I remembered long afterwards and 
distinctly the impression which saddened me, that 
we were not in this life to meet again. There 
was about him a lassitude and look of exhaustion 
which I never before noticed in him. Though we 
met no more, he continued to send to me by recur- 
ring opportunities kind messages and a few letters. 



^tabmv Commemomtton 15 

The next morning I proceeded by an early train 
up to London. On the way, further reflection 
determined me without delay to call upon the 
Very Reverend Dean Church ; and request him to 
interest the Archbishop of Canterbury. To see 
the Dean was, of course, in my plan from the 
first ; but the Archbishop was a new idea, and 
one which might effect a change in the programme 
for the commemoration. I called at the Deanery, 
near Doctors' Commons, the following day. The 
Dean was on the Continent. When I returned 
to 'London, in July, he was at home. I was known 
to him since August, 1872. We first met at the 
house of a dear common friend; I had shared his 
hospitality ; and many letters, chiefly on literary and 
social topics, had passed between us. I knew that I 
could, and I did with little preface, open the subject 
to him. Thoughts and sentiments habitual to him, 
and which were inspired by the dearest and ancient 
associations of his life, must, I was sure, give a wel- 
come reception to such a proposition as that which 
I was to offer. I found a ready and soon an eager 
auditor. It was clear from his animated manner, 
unusual to his calm repose, that the affair had his en- 
thusiastic sympathy. He certainly infused me with 
his own enthusiasm and increased mine ; and I now 
remember, though it did not awake my full atten- 
tion at the time, that we together walked the room 
during the greater part of our conference. As I pro- 
ceeded in enforcing the opportunity for the Church 



i6 pizmoiv concerning tl^e 

of England and its duty, he several times ejaculated, 
Noblesse oblige. Dean Church's imaginative faculty 
was strong, fine, and delicate; he was by nature 
a poet; he was a clear and comprehensive thinker; 
and no person who learned how he stood by New- 
man, rather in honest justice than mere friendship, in 
the days of tribulation at Oxford, especially in Feb- 
ruary, 1845, his proctor's year, could have doubted 
that he had " the courage of his convictions." Con- 
ciliatory, but uncompromising ; gentle, but firm ; sin- 
cerity, simplicity of feeling and of life, a sense of the 
awfulness of things unseen, were the characteristics 
of Richard William Church. 

I told him of my visit to Canon Liddon ; and 
repeated to him that the thought of such a com- 
memoration was my own, and had occurred to no 
one but myself as far as I was aware ; and that I 
had mentioned it to none but Canon Liddon and 
himself; that this reticence on my part was not 
that it may be kept to ourselves ; but, chiefly, that it 
might appear, and should in truth be, a spontaneous 
offering on the part of the authorities of St, Paul's, 
and proceeding from their own good and free will ; 
and it appeared to me that in any case — as the offer- 
ing must be unquestionably voluntary — no notice 
should be given officially, indeed none at all, to any of 
the Am^erican ecclesiastic authorities ; for every ap- 
pearance of previous understanding should be most 
carefully guarded against} 

1 And see the Memoir, Appendix, pp. 42, 44. 



^eaburt Commemoration \^ 

Dean Church finally answered that he saw the 
importance of the opportunity, and agreed with 
me that the commemoration should be an event 
to be originated by the official authorities of the 
Cathedral, to go forth as "a free-will offering," 
and, he added good-humoredly, "as you have said, 
in expiation." Dean Church recurs, perhaps, to 
this expression of mine, when in his letter of No- 
vember 15 (the day after the commemorative ser- 
vice) he wrote to me : " The Archbishop preached 
a striking sermon, bolder and more frank in its 
tone than we have heard recently from Archbishops, 
a reparation for the weakness and stagnancy of 

1784."' 

It was thus decided that the Commemorative 
Service should be undertaken. 

The Dean asked me if I had thought about a 
programme. I had: and this led us to consider 
particulars, wherein I did not withhold what had 
occurred to me. I mentioned some things that 
found place in the programme as after settled ; 
which makes it clearer why the Reverend Wil- 
liam Jones Seabury, D. D., who was the gospel- 
ler (a remarkable feature in the service), says to 
me, in his letter from London, written the day 
after the commemoration : " Only a line in the 
few minutes before the mail closes to tell you that 
your programme at St. Paul's was completely carried 
out and most successfully." ^ 

^ Appendix, p. 57. 2 Appendix, pp. 58, 59. 



i8 ittemoir concerntns tl^e 

I now perceived I might go farther, and — fol- 
lowing up this advantageous opening — said that 
the fundamental merit of the recognition of the 
occasion by the Cathedral authorities would be 
more ample, adequate, and as if it were " reen- 
forced," if the Archbishop of Canterbury took part 
personally, and officially on behalf of the Church 
of England itself. I then told him that Canon 
LiDDON had requested me to write a full memoir 
of the subject : a request from which we might con- 
clude that the Canon would be willing to preach 
the sermon. But I suggested that it was demanded 
by the purpose and meaning and reach of the com- 
memoration that the Archbishop should do it; that 
" that capstone would perfect the celebration as a 
monumental event, and confirm it by the highest 
ecclesiastical authority of Great Britain." The Dean 
promised to think over this: which he called a 
most valuable thought. He said that if he should 
judge it prudent and feasible to attempt, he would 
call on me the day but one following, at the hotel 
where I was staying. He called; I was away; and 
he left his card. I was, therefore, by this intima- 
tion, at liberty to assume that the Dean engaged to 
see the Archbishop. 

If the Archbishop consented, then a change in 
our plan might become due and appropriate. This 
would deny us the happiness of Canon Liddon 
being the preacher; but, however this might be, 
His Grace's presence was ardently to be desired : 



^tabmv Commemoration 19 

for it was the requirement essential to a historical 
reparation by the Church of England, and to the 
highest ecclesiastical authoritative sanction of the 
commemoration. It was natural to presuppose that 
many would desire and expect a great discourse, 
on the great theme, from him whom they regarded 
the greatest pulpit orator of our time. The absence 
of LiDDON from the pulpit of St. Paul's on that 
occasion must be noted : yet, as the commemoration 
demanded, so it would have graciously and abun- 
dantly bestowed upon it, that sanction which was 
essential to its perfect signification. Certainly it 
was not an opportunity to gratify individual likings 
and wishes — to attain the object for which we set 
out and to fully accomplish its purposes were the 
things desired. So, when His Grace consented, 
with characteristic kindness and readiness, not only 
to confer upon the commemoration his official pres- 
ence but to emphasize that act by preaching, it 
was esteemed, by those to whom in America and 
in England it was made known, a great boon; 
and it was, within the peculiar circumstances of the 
occasion, surely a most gracious act — nobly under- 
taken, and candidly and magnanimously performed, 
by the Archbishop. I was then of the opinion, 
since deepened into profound conviction, that the 
presence and the sermon of the Archbishop consti- 
tuted the commanding and consummating incident 
of the day celebrated: truly, in the language of 
Dean Church, " a reparation for the weakness and 
stagnancy of 1784." 



20 iKemotr concernins tl^e 

It would be an unpardonable omission to leave un- 
noticed and unacknowledged the part which Canon 
LiDDON did bear to the event. He was, as I have 
already said, the first to whom I suggested the 
thought of having a commemoration at St. Paul's. 
Had November been one of the months during 
which he was to be in residence at the Cathedral, 
his own activity would have been more apparent and 
greater in the affair. He was the first to under- 
stand and to esteem its justice and importance : and 
to the end he was diligent wherever he could aid its 
promotion.^ 

Liddon's heart was touched and pierced by the 
occasion, and was full of the spirit of the theme; 
and this I soon after could see more fully, and 
understand, from a letter he wrote me from High- 
clerc Castle, on November 28, 1884: "The general 
impression here was that the occasion was one for 
serious thankfulness to God. The pervading spirit 
was excellent, and the Archbishop's sermon in har- 
mony with it, generally speaking; although I wish 
he had been able to state briefly, but firmly, the 
nature and necessity of the truth which was the 
inspiring nature of Bishop Seabury's courageous 

1 It is not to be supposed — indeed it was not possible — that what I 
here relate of Canon Liddon became known to the Archbishop. It 
was wholly private between the Canon and me — and, as to the suppo- 
sition, at that time, that he might be induced to preach the sermon, it 
was simply an inference of my own, and as such mentioned to Dean 
Church. Indeed, what I have said on the preceding page has indi- 
cated this. 



^tabmv Commemoration 21 

act. He took it for granted; but, in view of the 
great ignorance of the mass of the people on reli- 
gious subjects, something more explicit would have 
been welcome. I almost fear that it may seem 
ungrateful to His Grace to write in this way ; but 
I wish to be perfectly honest when writing to you." ^ 
Having accomplished my " heart's desire " I 
turned my way homeward. At Shrewsbury, where 
I rested for a few days before leaving for New York, 
I received a letter, dated at St. Andrew's, Scotland, 
July 29, 1884, from the venerable Charles Words- 
worth, the Bishop of St. Andrews, an acquaintance 
and correspondent of mine.^ It related to the com- 

1 Appendix, p. 59. 

2 The above was written before his death, and it appears to me 
that I should now add — what is due to his memory and intended for 
" a token of high respect and gratitude sincere " — an acknowledgment 
of the Bishop's efficient service promoting the Commemoration at 
Aberdeen. I was from the first made aware of his efforts. He was 
in whole accord with the spirit of the centennial celebration in Scot- 
land ; but the significance and value of the "reparation" offered to 
both the Churches of Scotland and America by the Church of England 
at St. Paul's was that which was most esteemed and most cherished 
by him as a member of the Church 0/ (not merely z'n) Scotland. 

Charles Wordsworth, D. D., D. C. L., Bishop of St. Andrews 
and Fellow of Winchester College, was born at Lambeth, England, on 
August 22, 1806. He was eminent as a scholar, in erudition and in 
classical learning, excelling in Latin versification, — he was the private 
tutor at Oxford of Gladstone, — famous in his Mastership at Winches- 
ter College, an author of acknowledged ability, and a preacher of high 
repute, yet it is probable that he will be more widely remembered 
and distinguished by his work on Shakespeare's Knowledge and Uses 
of the Bible. On Sunday, April 24, 1864, at Stratford-on-Avon, he 
was the sermoner at the Shakespeare Tercentenary Celebration. Our 
correspondence for some years related chiefly to his labors making 



22 0Ltmoit concerning tl^e 

memoration festival to be held in October at Aber- 
deen. He wrote : '' I only regret that your engage- 
ments require you to return home without paying 
us a visit in this country. When I first recognized 
your handwriting, and saw that it was dated from 
Shrewsbury, I was in hopes that you had come over 
for the centenary, where your presence would be 
so very appropriate and so highly welcome." ^ But 
I could not remain. I had work at home for the 
St. Paul's Commemoration. 

Soon after my arrival at home I wrote (August 
20, 1884) to Dean Church, and gave him an addi- 
tional hint for the programme, pointing out to him 
the felicitous propriety of the Reverend Dr. Seabury, 
of New York, being invited to read the Gospel ; ^ 

clear the pervading influence of the Tyndal and the standard English 
translations of the Bible on Shakespeare's mind, and literary taste, and 
skill. In the last letter but one which (dated Kilrymont, December 
12, 1890) I received from the Bishop, he, recurring to this subject, his 
favorite occupation in latter years, says to me : " I have much pleasure 
in sending a photograph taken of me in Edinburgh only a fortnight 
ago. I am now in my eighty-fifth year, . . . My ' Shakespeare and the 
Bible ' is now nearly out of print ; and I am thinking of preparing a new 
edition. ... I venture to ask whether you can give me any assistance 
for its improvement. Have you got the last {third') edition, which 
contains my Stratford Tercentenary Sermon, and other considerable 
additions ? Those additions, entitled ' Additional Illustrations,' and 
now placed in an Appendix, I should wish to have inserted in their 
proper places of the main text." 

The Bishop had forgotten that, at the time (1880) when the third edi- 
tion was published, he sent to me a copy ; and with kind words prefaced 
by his own hand opposite its title-page. His last gift to me was his 
Discourses on the Primary Witness to the Truth of the Gospel — his 
last publication. 

1 Appendix, p. 39. 2 /^/^.^ p. 41. 



^tabmv Commemoration 23 

and I enclosed the promised " Memoir," in dupli- 
cate, — one for himself, the other, if required, for 
the Archbishop. Dr. Seabury was not aware of this 
suggestion.^ I posted to Canon Liddon two copies 
of the memoir : ^ he to give one to Canon Gregory. 
It was a lengthy paper of sixteen closely written 
pages. It furnished all biographical facts and inci- 
dents of Seabury, and indulged in observations and 
reflections; some of which appear to have been 
worked into the Archbishop's sermon.^ 

Some remarks connected with Unitarianism in 
New England * and a curious incident attending its 
meeting-house at Hartford, related by me in that 
" Memoir," have, I am informed, not agreed with 
the understanding of certain persons, — one an emi- 
nent American prelate. I know nothing of my 
own knowledge of what I related ; but hearsay was 
never sustained by better testimony, for all that I 
made use of came from the Honorable James Dixon, 

1 Here I think it in place to quote from that letter : "I hesitate to 
make any suggestion as to details of the ceremonies — but it might be 
a pleasing and notable feature that the Rev. William Jones Seabury, 
D. D., the Bishop's great-grandson, should read the gospel for the 
day — in the very place from whence his noble ancestor was sent forth 
to preach the Gospel in America. Dr. Seabury will be in London 
within a few days after the celebration at Aberdeen ; and I avail my- 
self of your [general] permission and give him a letter to you. I have 
not, of course, mentioned anything of my suggestion as to his reading 
the gospel. You will be pleased with him ; he is a learned, able, and 
unaffected man." 

2 Appendix, p. 40. 

8 Idid., pp. 7o> 71- See note a to the Archbishop's sermon, idz'cf., p. 70. 
* /did., p. 44. 



24 ittcmoir concerning tl^e 

of Hartford, a Senator of the United States, and 
who was a most active member of Trinity while it 
was yet of the Unitarian association. After he be- 
came a Churchman Mr. Dixon supervised the dilapi- 
dation of the old edifice. The ancient materials 
were at once moved to another part of the town ; 
and there, each stone replaced in its former rela- 
tion, the reconstructed edifice was consecrated by 
Bishop Williams, the Primate of our American 
Church; and the sermon was preached by Dr. 
Huntington, now the Bishop of Central New York, 
and who, when a preacher in Unitarianism, had 
himself often preached to gatherings within its walls. 
While on a visit to Mr. Dixon, in August, 1865, 
we viewed the " old materials," reerected and conse- 
crated in the new site; and there he told me the 
story which I relate in the " Memoir." 

The next stage, in order of time, was that, in 
the latter part of September, from Dean Church, a 
letter came, dated the 17th, telling me: "We hope 
to have a Commemoration Service at St. Paul's on 
November 14; and, further, that the Archbishop of 
Canterbury has gladly consented to preach on the 
occasion. I enclose his note. Thank you for the 
paper which you were so good as to send me, and 
of which I sent one copy to the Archbishop." ^ 

The time was now ripe when I might disclose 
what was done, and doing, to the Right Reverend 
Horatio Potter, Bishop of New York, and to the 

^ Appendix, p. 51. 



^tabmv Commemoratfott 25 

Assistant Bishop, the Right Reverend Henry Cod- 
man Potter. The Assistant Bishop, answering 
from Newport a note of mine, appointed Friday, 
October 3d, to meet me in New York.^ We met, 
and I told him all without reserve ; and showed 
him Dean Church's letter of September 17. The 
Assistant Bishop desired to acquaint the public 
with the intelligence, and he requested me to write 
to the Bishop. In compliance I sent a letter to 
the Right Reverend Horatio Potter.^ 

The letter was published by the Bishop, and 
with my consent, in the newspapers, and so the affair 
became public. /^ will be seen that I was careful to 
have it made clear that the St, Paul's Commemora- 
tion Service was wholly a voluntary act, and that no 
official notice to our Church was to be expected. 

Another letter came from Dean Church, dated 
"London, The Deanery, St. Paul's, Nov. 4, 1884," 
telling me: "All is settled for November 14. I 
hoped to have sent you with my letter a copy of 
the Service, but it is not ready for the printer. I 
send you the Special Psalms, Lessons, and Collects, 
all of Dr. Liddon's selection. As I told you, the 
Archbishop will preach. ... I have asked Dr. 
Seabury to read the Gospel. ... I hope you will 
accept it as an evidence of our sympathy, and 
of the great and happy changes which a hundred 
years have wrought in the ideas and feelings of 
Churchmen on both sides of the water, and not 

^ Appendix, p. 52. 2 /^/^.^ pp, 52-53. 



26 ^tmoit concerntng t^t 

of Churchmen only, but of the two peoples who 
speak the English tongue. You will remember us 
on the 14th." ^ 

Canon Liddon's original memoranda^ of the 
"Special Psalms, Lessons, and Collects" were en- 
closed in that letter, and are among the "inset" 
papers, as, also, the note of the Archbishop,^ en- 
closed in the Dean's former letter. 

There ended my part. 

Afterwards I received from Canon Liddon the 
letter written at Highclerc, from which I have 
quoted, and a letter from Dean Church, written 
at the Deanery the day next after the Commem- 
oration. The great event was consummated in the 
Cathedral, and at the time appointed. It is to the 
latter letter that attention is required. After fully 
describing, in glowing phrases and in minuteness, 
the entire ceremony and its incidents, the Dean 
says : " I tell you this, because you are the one 
person to whom the idea of this Commemoration, 
which many of us look at as a historical event, is 
entirely due." ^ While this statement is probably 
wholly correct, it seemed strange at the time that 
the Dean should mention to me a fact known to each 
of us ; yet I felt quite sure that he could not mean 
to offer a certificate of the part which I had borne 
to the event. My heart was satisfied that the event 

^ Appendix, p. 56. 2 /^/^.^ p. ^7. 

3 /did., p. 52. * /h'd., p. 58. 



^tahmv Commemoration 27 

was brought forth and the purpose accompHshed. 
I had no wish further to be gratified. The circum- 
stance passed from my mind, until it was revived 
by an incident, in the summer of 1888, when I 
visited again Dean Church at the Deanery. 

Since the Commemoration I have met and re- 
ceived kind attentions from those in England — 
except the manly and gentle Liddon — who were 
concerned in it. Two of the three who then pri- 
vately acted together in its initiation have passed 
"through nature to eternity." The occasion and 
the time are now come when I, the survivor of 
those three, am in duty bound to tell the tale. 
Wherefore I have caused to be " inset " the " origi- 
nal correspondence and other proof of that his- 
torical event" in a unique book, durably and 
appropriately bound : where they may hereafter 
be seen by those interested; and to which book 
I have, in my own penmanship, prefixed an intro- 
duction, the substance of which is contained in 
this memoir. The volume contains the original 
records of the whole course of proceeding. I shall 
finally lodge that book in a public place for safe 
care, and there accessible as material for history. 

During our talk in 1888, Dean Church called 
my attention to the printed " Form of Service " 
used at the ceremonies, and which was distributed 
to the congregation at the Commemoration. It 
had on its cover the words that the celebration 
was " a^ the request of the American Bishops repre- 



28 iHemotr concetmns t\)t 

senting the Sixty-five Dioceses of the Church in the 
United States which have sprung of Seaburys line " / / ^ 
It appeared that, as a copy of the Form of Service 
had been sent to me at New York the day of the 
Commemoration, the Dean had assumed I must 
notice the statement, and felt it should be, to my 
understanding, offensive, as a misconception and 
an untruth. Hence the letter^ written by the Dean 
the very next day after the celebration, and stating 
to me : — 

" / tell you this, because you are the one person to whom the 
idea of this Commemoration, which many of us look at as a histori- 
cal event, is entirely due. When you proposed it to me in the sum- 
mer, I had not thought of it; and all that I did was to approach 
the Archbishop, who received the proposal with the most cordial 
sympathy, and put off another engagement to take his part in 
it. / hope you will let me thank you as a benefactor to both our 
Churches. 

Yours gratefully and faithfully, 

R. W. Church. "« 

The Dean had been disturbed by what he thought 
an injustice done to me; and I perceived that he, 
supposing I would observe it, had so promptly 
written that letter to set himself aright. I told him 
I had not noticed it; but that the proper question 
was not about me, — it was about the misstatement 
itself, which gave a false front to the object which 
Canon Liddon, he, and myself had in our purpose. 
The " Form of Service " had been prepared by 

^ Appendix, p. 6i. ^ jjjid.^ p. 58. 

3 The italicizing in this page is mine. 



^tabnxv Commemoration 29 

the Dean and Canon Liddon themselves, and in 
their own handwriting ; that part done by the latter 
was sent at the time to me, without my asking, as 
were all the other original drafts, for souvenirs ; and it 
is preserved by me, with those others, in the book of 
which I have spoken. Nothing, I was assured, was 
uttered by either of them as to any " request of 
American Bishops." Canon Liddon himself, as I 
am informed, was equally annoyed. I felt certain 
that the Dean suspected, if he did not know, the 
personage who, superserviceably, caused those words 
to be so absurdly intruded. I did not wish to learn, 
— I did not inquire. The swing of eloquence by 
which the announcement ends, that the request is 
made by the Bishops " which have sprung of Sea- 
bury's line," almost sufficiently indicates the author 
of this maladroit act. 

It is proper and commendable, therefore, to cor- 
rect a statement — so published as if officially 
authorized — which asserted publicly, and so ab- 
surdly in the face of the primal and controlling 
intention and all the circumstances of the event, 
that the Commemoration was, on the part of the 
Church of England, a compliance with " the request 
of the Bishops " of the " Church in the United 
States." And the truth is that, by the time the 
Commemoration became feasible, and while details 
for the Service were under consideration, the Amer- 
ican Bishops had left for their several dioceses, 
and only three of them then in England were at 



30 pLzmoit concerning tl^e 

St. Paul's. "You shall hear more when details are 
arranged," the Dean wrote to me — " But everybody 
is still out of town." ^ By another letter (November 
4) he says : " We hope to have all your Bishops 
who are now in England: Albany, Minnesota, and 
Fond du Lac ; " ^ and again (November 1 5) he adds : 
" We had our Service yesterday. . . . There were 
ifkree American Bishops — I wish we had more, but 
they were gone." ^ There is nothing in those letters 
about any request, nor about Bishops representing 
sixty-five or any less number of Dioceses ! But, in 
verity and candor, such a statement, if ever credited^ 
would be not only contradictory of the originating 
spirit, and of the scope and object of the St. Paul's 
" reparation," but would blur the aspect and deny 
the magnanimity of its coming to the Church in 
America a "free-will offering," — as, indeed, it did — 
unasked, unannounced, unexpected. Wherefore, in 
correction of any such perversion, I write and pub- 
lish this Memoir. It was of this initiative purpose 
on the part of the official authority at St. Paul's I 
had written to Bishop Horatio Potter, after re- 
ceiving the Dean's first letter. Dean Church and 
Canon Liddon felt this perversion of the intention 
and object which impelled us to produce the event; 
and they were anxious that the unhappy incident, if 
it should ever obtain currency, might not impair the 
efficacy of what Dean Church calls "a reparation 
for the weakness and stagnancy of 1784." That 

1 Appendix, p. 51. ^ /^/^.^ p. 56. ^ Ibid.^ p. SI- 



^tabmv Commemoration 31 

reparation was to be unsolicited: — That was alone 
the excuse why a layman should have made the 
suggestion. No one in ecclesiastical authority in 
the United States could make such a request, with- 
out incurring the censure of being a suppliant for 
a recognition which we know the Seabury succes- 
sion does not need: and which our dioceses would 
not permit to be questioned. Yet that is just what 
a well-meaning marplot, afflicted by an unappeasa- 
ble desire to do good, has made appear. It was a 
blunder. 

Where was the Church of Scotland in this Com- 
memoration? She was surely interested, and, by 
the same invitation as that offered to the Amer- 
ican Bishops, her Bishops were associated in its 
reparatory scope.^ Her Bishops were present, they 

^ It is well to emphasize this comment, by here reflecting upon the 
Archbishop's appropriate, candid, and nervous statement of the case, 
which was then and there to be considered, of The Church of Scotland : 
" Once more in the Church's history God committed deliverance not to 
the strong but to the smallest and feeblest of all. The third person of 
the drama, the Church once *of Scotland,' was in the dust. Her Offi- 
cers and her Offices lay under terrible disabilities. Legislation had 
recently attempted to annihilate even what a writer of the times prop- 
erly called ' her shattered remains.' She worshipped under penal stat- 
utes, the more insulting because no one would now have executed 
them. Still she could not emerge from back streets and upper floors. 
And the poor remnant of her Bishops, four in number, lived, driven 
into one diocese, in poverty and in piety. Her very existence was a 
breach of law, like that of a Church of the first days under a humane 
emperor. Her holiest acts were offences, the more sacred the more 
criminal. She was asked to undertake what The Church of England 
was not strong enough to effect. And thus she answered in the person 



32 ^tmoiv concernfng tl^z 

united in the great consummation, and they received 
there, on behalf of " the Catholic remainder of the 
antient Church of Scotland,"^ the testimony of a 
redress due to more than a century and a half of 
unjust negation. 

It has — ever since I learned of the eccentric 
deviation from the true history of the origin and ob- 
ject of the Commemoration — been my intention 
that, when the occasion and the time came, a full 
and corrected record should be made. This I now 

of one of her poor prelates : ' Considering the great depositum com- 
mitted to us, I do not see how we can account to our great Lord and 
Master if we neglect such an opportunity of promoting His truth and 
enlarging the borders of His Church.' So then, while the new States 
eyed Episcopacy with a suspicious hate that had its roots in the past, 
and believed it to be irreconcilable with the interests of a Republic, 
little knowing what strength it had lent to every form of government in 
its turn ; while the idea of it seemed, alas ! so lost in State-craft that 
even the Church of America itself partly doubted for a while whether 
its orders were certainly valid, as having been conferred without the 
consent of a State ; while a proposal was being ventilated for a nominal 
Episcopacy created by lay and clerical votes ; while our Lord Chancellor 
was instructing the House of Lords that the Episcopal clergy for other 
countries should be ordained by English and Irish prelates only — 
while such were the 'counsels of princes,' the feeble remnant in Scot- 
land was quietly facing the crisis of the Church of the future. Humbly 
and peacefully, with knowledge of what they were doing, they laid their 
hands on the chosen man in an upper chamber, and imparted to the 
New World the gift of ' a free, valid and purely ecclesiastical Epis- 
copacy.' These were their own words, ' free, valid, and purely eccle- 
siastical.' It is no wonder that those ringing words sound again and 
again in the letters of that time, and that they were incorporated in 
the 'beloved concordat* which ruled the relations of Scotland and 
America." 

^ Appendix, see Concordat, p. 86 : on that page. 



^tahutv Commemoratfon 33 

perform : — the occasion, when I have gathered to- 
gether, in a form appropriate and well-chosen for 
preservation, the original manuscripts, which of 
themselves tell the story ; the time, when Richard 
William Church ^ and Henry Parry Liddon,^ my 
consociates in the affair, are taken from this life. 

As I pen its last lines, I feel as is expressed in 
the closing words of the Second Book of the 
Maccabees: "And if I have done well, and as is 
fitting the story, it is that which I desired ; but 
if slenderly and meanly, it is that which I could 
attain unto." I have no pride of place myself, nor 
feeling of elation. Whatever sentiment I have ever 
been conscious of has always been that of humility 
and thankfulness. In the hands of Providence the 
weakest are fully efficient. 

Geo: Shea. 

New York, 205 West 46TH Street, 
Feast of The Annunciation, 1893. 

1 Died, December 15, 1890. » Died, September 9, 1890. 



Nulla Ecclesia Sine Episcopo 

Seabury's Motto 



9lppentiitefi : 



CORRESPONDENCE AND OTHER PROOF OF THE 
COMMEMORATION 



^ppentiices 



Page ante 22. 

BiSHOPSHALL, St. Andrews, July 29, '84. 

My dear Sir, — I thank you very much for your 
kind and interesting letter, and for the trouble you 
have been so good as to take. I only regret that 
your engagements require you to return home with- 
out paying us a visit in this country. When I 
first recognized your handwriting and saw that you 
dated from Shrewsbury, I was in hopes that you 
had come over for the Centenary ; where your pres- 
ence would be so very appropriate, and so highly 
welcome. It is some consolation however to think 
that by returning you may be able to persuade Dr. 
Seabury to accept the Bishop of Aberdeen's invi- 
tation. 

I ought to have written before to thank you for 
your communication of last September which I was 
glad to receive and have kept by me. It is not proba- 
ble that I shall live to see another edition of my 
" Shakespeare and the Bible," as I shall enter next 
month upon my 78th year ; but I do not forget your 
kind interest in the book, and should much value 
any contribution which you may at any time send 
me for its improvement. I am anxious to get it 
introduced as a prize book into schools for which I 
venture to think it is not unsuitable upon more 
than one account. 

I am, my dear sir, 

Yours very faithfully, 

C. Wordsworth. 



40 appenDicesi 

Page 23. 
Personal. New York, Aug. 20th, 1884. 

Very Rev. and Dear Dean, — Since my arrival, 
some twelve days ago, I have had urgent demands 
on my time which delayed the "discourse" that I 
enclose. I did not like to recite all the reasons 
which I gave to you in conversation : but I assure 
you that we cannot overestimate the benefits that 
are likely to spring from such a celebration of the 
Centenary as St. Paul's alone can undertake and 
present. 

I enclose my letter in duplicate; as, should you 
lay the affair before His Grace of Canterbury in 
pursuance of your thought to have him preach the 
sermon, you might deem it desirable to leave one 
of the duplicates with the Archbishop. I send a 
similar letter to Canon Liddon according to his 
permission: for his own use, and to be used, per- 
haps in unison with you, in an interview with 
Canon Gregory. I hope and expect that Canon 
Gregory will take kindly and warmly to the sug- 
gestion, when either Canon Liddon or yourself pre- 
sent it. Several of our own bishops and distin- 
guished of our clergy have accepted the invitation 
of the Primate and other Scotch bishops to be 
present at their celebration for the 5th, 6th, 7th, 
and 8th October. But no celebration can reach the 
moral value of the proposed ceremony on the exact 
day of consecration — Nov. 14 — in St. Paul's. 
From that mother-church went forth the mission- 
aries of the Society for the Propagation of the 
Gospel in America, whose labors cleared the field 
for the establishment of the Episcopate here : from 



appendices; 41 

that spot Bishop Sherlock (Dec. 1753) sent forth 
the priest Seabury, who was to be, in the fullness 
of time, the first bishop. You will notice that 
Seabury had his degree of doctor conferred on 
him by Oxford. 

I hesitate to make any suggestion as to details 
of the ceremonies — but it might be a pleasing 
and notable feature that the Rev. William Jones 
Seabury, D. D., the Bishop's great-grandson, should 
read the gospel for the day — in the very place 
from whence his noble ancestor was sent forth to 
preach the Gospel in America. Dr. Seabury will 
be in London within a few days after the celebra- 
tion at Aberdeen ; and I avail myself of your per- 
mission and give him a letter to you. I have not, 
of course, mentioned anything of my suggestion as 
to his reading the gospel. You will be pleased 
with him ; he is a learned, able, and unaffected man. 

Ever faithfully, 

Geo. Shea. 

To the Very Rev. Dean Church. 



Pages 23, 24. 

New York, Aug. 19th, '84. 
7 Nassau Street. 

Very Reverend and dear Dean, — I avail my- 
self of the privilege which you have opened; and 
address you concerning the anniversary of the estab- 
lishment of The Church in America. A hundred 
years nearly have passed since that great epoch 
in our Church began in the consecration of Samuel 
Seabury at Longeau, Aberdeen, Scotland, on No- 
vember 14, 1784, by Bishop Kilgour, primus; 



42 appendices 

Bishop Petrie, and Bishop Skinner, who described 
themselves in the Concordat/ then made with this 
newly-created American Bishop, as " of the Catholic 
remainder of the ancient Church." There appears 
to have been significant and historical truth in 
that description, as a table^ of their Episcopal succes- 
sion, now before me, attests. 

It seems to those of our faith in America that 
such an event should be thankfully and piously 
celebrated ; and directions have been authoritatively 
given to that end. At the Convention last autumn 
I had the honor to be appointed one of the lay mem- 
bers of the Committee who are to suggest a form 
of celebration proper for this Diocese. Though not 
within the scope of the duties of that Committee 
— still, as a personal suggestion, induced by the 
friendly regard with which you have often honored 
me, I venture to offer a suggestion which, it seems 
to me, s this superb occasion warrants ; and which 
the manifest benefits likely to arise from its adop- 
tion might commend to the wisdom and brotherly 
love of those high and highest in our mother Church 
of England. 

It would be an assumption for those in the Amer- 
ican Church to make a request ; but it has occurred 
to me, as I have personally stated to you, that perhaps 
a churchman like myself not in official ecclesiastical 
authority might suggest to you, as the Dean of St. 
Paul's, how gracious and becoming would be a 
voluntary recognition of this Centenary by a special 
service in St. Paul's Cathedral — that Cathedral to 
which American churchmen are taught to look, and 
always look up to, as our Metropolitan, and as the 

^ See infra^ pp. 85-89. ^ See infra, between pp. 84, 85. 



Propaganda of those churches which have proceeded 
from the Anglican successions. 

The Church in Scotland has already determined, 
— and this comes of its own unprompted wish, — 
to mark the event by solemn services, and it has 
completed its arrangements for the 5th -8th Octo- 
ber next. This somewhat anticipates, you will per- 
ceive, the actual day of Dr. Seabury's consecration ; 
the reason for which is that those Bishops and 
Clergy invited from the American States might 
return in time for their duties at home. Among 
those specially invited by the Scottish Bishops to 
take part in those services is the Rev. William Jones 
Seabury, D. D., the great-grandson and nearest liv- 
ing lineal descendant of the Bishop. He is the 
Rector of the Church of The Annunciation in New 
York, and the Professor of Ecclesiastical Polity 
and Law in our Theological College in this city. 
Bishops and other ecclesiastical personages are also 
invited to be present at the ceremonies from The 
Church of England. 

The celebration by The Church of Scotland will 
be significantly commemorative and one of which 
we shall be proud. But it cannot attain for us, 
nor hold, that " vantage ground " which, historically 
and in our veneration, belongs, in this view, to The 
Church of England. From the Society for the Pro- 
pagation of the Faith, under authority and license 
of The Church of England, came to the American 
Colonies those missionaries who, in these new fields, 
first met and checked the politico-religious intoler- 
ance of the Puritan. This was before the States 
became independent of and separate from the Brit- 
ish Crown. The history of those days should be 



44 appennices 

written — there is no prouder and fewer fruitful 
chapters in the history of the missionary labors 
and triumphs of the Anglican Church. The State 
of Connecticut — the diocese to which Seabury was 
elected and for which he was consecrated ; the home 
of Jonathan Edwards, and then and long afterwards 
the hotbed ^ of Unitarianism — is this day through- 
out its land without a house of Unitarian worship. 
The last house for such worship has years ago been 
consecrated in the service of our Faith. Its last 
Unitarian minister is now the Bishop of Central 
New York, Dr. Huntington. 

Is it not proper, "sweet and commendable," an 
obligation which the Metropolitan Cathedral of the 
Anglican World owes to its own position as our 
ancient centre and propaganda, to confirm the re- 
sults of its own missionary success in America, and 
our growing filial sympathies, by a special service 
acknowledging the event of not merely the establish- 
ment, but of the grateful acceptance of the Episcopal 
order and The Church in a land that was once the 
peculiar domain of the Puritan. Such an act, spring- 
ing from the willing kindness of those in authority^ 
as yourself would do more to bind closer and firmer, 
as " in hoops of steel," Anglican and American 
Churchmen than can be estimated in cool words; 
though it may be haply guessed. 

Some facts and thoughts are appropriate herein 
as to the man in whose person this church work was 
begun, and by the abiding spirit of whose intrepid 

^ It may be that the phrase used here is somewhat exaggerated : but 
surely the substance of the thought is appropriate ; for, if that region 
was not a hotbed of Unitarianism, surely that moral philosophy always 
found a welcome there, and a warm, hospitable corner at its hearths. 



discretion and uncompromising charity, our American 
Church has steadily gained unto its present almost 
national standing and authority throughout this 
Empire of States. 

Samuel Seabury was born November 30, 1729, at 
Groton, near New London, in the Colony of Con- 
necticut; he was educated at and graduated from 
Yale College, in New Haven, that State, 1748; he 
afterwards went to Edinburgh, Scotland, and studied 
medicine at the University, but, after acquiring a 
very competent knowledge in that science, he elected 
to devote himself to the study of theology, and with 
proper preparation he was ordained deacon on Fri- 
day, December 21, 1753, and on the Sunday follow- 
ing, admitted to priest orders, and on the same day, 
by Sherlock, Bishop of London, licensed and author- 
ized to perform the office of priest in New Jersey, 
and in 1754 he entered upon his duties at New 
Brunswick, in that Province. He was, on January 
12, 1757, collated and inducted into the parish of 
Jamaica, Long Island, by Sir Charles Hardy, Gover- 
nor of New York ; and having been instituted rector 
of St. Peter's, in Westchester County, by mandate 
of Sir Henry Moore, December 3, 1766, he was 
formally inducted to that office March i, 1767, by 
the Rev. Myles Cooper, D. D., President of King's 
College, in the city of New York. 

The Clergy of the Church of England, Mission- 
aries in the Province of New York, felt a special 
interest in the controversy in which that Church 
was the chief and direct object of political attack. 
The famous William Livingston — who inherited 
the bias of his ancestor Robert Livingston, the 
non-conformist divine who settled at Rotterdam, 



46 iappentitce0 

Holland, after he had been one of the Commissioners 
in 1650 to Charles II. at Breda — was publishing a 
party-organ, " The American Whig," in New York, 
and conducting the fierce memorable opposition 
made to any project to establish an episcopate in 
America by the Church of England. His party was 
numerically great and overwhelming. The strife be- 
tween the Church in America and those who clus- 
tered about the various bodies of Dissenters was one 
of long continuance. It began as early as 1753 (the 
year before Seabury came as priest to America), and, 
though its heat had abated, it was prepared to break 
out afresh at any moment. It was most fierce and 
unqualified by charity in Massachusetts ; but less 
fierce in New York only by comparison. There- 
fore, in the triumph of a revolt for political inde- 
pendence and separation, nothing less was feared 
than absolute and utter prostration for the Church; 
and while the Clergy wished well to the King, 
they desired better for the Church. Seabury was 
the main and most powerful antagonist of this anti- 
episcopate party ; a powerful and prolific writer. 
He was a stout churchman, of strong convictions, 
and, by those convictions, a loyalist. He w^as sin- 
cerely and proudly an American, in the sense in 
which Bishop Berkeley and Benjamin Franklin 
were, when they each saw the greater future of 
the Colonies in a grander British Empire in Amer- 
ica; but, like Berkeley, Seabury wished to see the 
Church, in its Episcopal authority, able to accom- 
pany, independently, the State in the boundless 
sphere of missionary duty which arose before their 
imaginations. 

In simple, earnest words, written by him in the 



hour of exile and affliction, in 1783, at London, 
he tells the story of that period. His dread of 
the influence which the Puritan minds of Massa- 
chusetts were directing against the introduction of 
the Church into New England, was equal almost 
to the hatred which Massachusetts professed against 
the Episcopate. He feared, likewise, the concerted 
plans to a similar end which were still kept in 
operation by William Livingston and his coherents. 
Those were of that kind which was most active in 
propagating doctrines going to alienate the hearts 
of the colonists from and to uproot the few and 
slender plants which the Anglican Church had lodged 
in the new world. Seabury fully apprehended the 
course which probable events would take. " Some 
years after," he himself relates, " when it was evident 
from continued publications in newspapers, and from 
the uniting of all the jarring interests of the Indepen- 
dents and Presbyterians from Massachusetts to Geor- 
gia, under grand Committees and Synods, that some 
mischievous scheme was meditated against the 
Church of England ... in America," he entered 
" into an agreement with the Rev. Dr. T. B. Chand- 
ler, then of Elizabethtown, New Jersey, and the Rev. 
Dr. Inglis, the Rector of Trinity Church in the 
city of New York, to watch all publications, either 
in newspapers or in pamphlets, and so obviate the 
evil influence of such as appear to have a bad 
tendency, by the speediest answers." Faithfully 
and assiduously Seabury did his part of the agree- 
ment — he and his two associates bore the whole 
weight of the polemic controversy. In November, 
1775, a body of men, to whom the writings of Sea- 
bury were objectionable, set out from New Haven, 



48 appennicegt 

Connecticut, for the purpose of seizing the per- 
sons of Seabury, Lord Underhill, the Mayor of the 
Borough of Westchester, and a Mr. Fowler, one of 
the Justices of the County. On their way they 
were joined by some eighty others going to New 
York; after burning 3, small sloop at Mamaroneck, 
and taking Underhill and Fowler, the party went 
(November 19) to the rectory of Seabury, and "not 
finding him at home [Seabury MSS.) they beat his 
children to oblige them to tell where their father 
was ; which not succeeding, they searched the neigh- 
borhood and took him from his school," and placed 
him under a strong guard to be conducted to Con- 
necticut. The guard, " with much abusive lan- 
guage," proceeded with the prisoner "in great tri- 
umph to New Haven, seventy miles distant, where 
he was paraded through most of the streets, and 
their success celebrated by firing of cannon," etc. 
At New Haven he was confined under a military 
guard and keepers for six weeks. When released, 
and after his return to his rectory, he suffered much, 
both from insult and the loss of property, by parties 
who were almost daily passing through his parish 
to join the recruits for the army then beginning 
to gather in New York. His home, during his 
absence, was pillaged, and he with his family left 
destitute. In June, 1777, he was appointed by Sir 
William Howe, Chaplain to the Provincial Hospital 
at New York; and in January, 1778, Chaplain to 
the King's American Regim'ent. He held those 
offices till he went from New York, on the 7th of 
June, 1783, direct to England, and there he, in lodg- 
ings at No. 393 Oxford Street, London, resolutely 
and hopefully meditated how best to serve the 



Church, which was nearest and ever in his heart 
of hearts. Seabury had done what he beheved to 
be his duty to the King and to the State — that had 
passed. His God and the Church remained. To 
America he had determined to return, and there 
resume the labor of his Master's vineyard. He was 
disenthralled from a conscientious, but embarrassing, 
allegiance. Providence had permitted his native 
land to be a state without a King ; it was his cher- 
ished task to see that his native land should have a 
Church, and not without a Bishop. Nulla ecclesia 
sine episcopo was the legend which he adopted to 
proclaim his design. That is still to this day the 
legend, inscribed beneath a bishop's mitre, upon the 
organ of the Church of The Annunciation, in New 
York city : the Church founded by his grandson. Sea- 
bury saw that his true mission and purpose of life now 
opened to him. He was elected in Connecticut to be 
its Bishop. He applied to one or more of the Eng- 
Hsh Bishops for consecration ; they, for some passing 
political reason, delayed ; so, greatly as he preferred 
that his episcopal authority and apostolic power 
should proceed from the Church of England, by 
which he had been ordained deacon and priest, he 
applied to the Church of Scotland, and was sent 
to be the first bishop of the American Church. 
On the Sunday after his arrival, June 20, 1785, he 
preached his first sermon in America at Newport, 
at which place he landed ; it was delivered from the 
pulpit where Berkeley had often proclaimed aspira- 
tions that the Church might be " planted " in Amer- 
ica. And it is worthy of reflection to note that 
Seabury fixed the seat of his Episcopal See in that 
very Connecticut to which he had been led a pris- 



50 appenDicejs 

oner by violent men, paraded a captive through the 
streets of its chief city, and immured in its jail for 
six weeks, insulted and threatened. 

But he came there to preach a greater peace than 
that which had resulted from the shock of arms. 
He was at last heard and respected by those who had 
dreaded the Church and his office. His great suf- 
ferings in the cause of The Faith had won their 
admxiration and confidence. He was to them still 
the same simple, grand, conciliatory, uncompro- 
mising man. He was careful to omit nothing that 
the sacerdotal traditions of time and custom had 
associated with his high ofiice. In his office he 
buried his personality, and subscribed himself " Sam- 
uel of Connecticut," and a mitre, still preserved 
" with religious care " in our Trinity College, at 
Hartford, Connecticut, pressed his brows. In his 
private life he was most frugal and unostentatious. 
His sermons, in their style, remind us of those 
which Sherlock spoke when Master of the Temple. 
Perhaps there is a reason why Sherlock's writings 
had so much influence upon Samuel Seabury, for, 
besides receiving ordination under the supervision of 
that prelate, " Episcopacy, or the patriarchate " in 
America, was said to have been first proposed by 
Sherlock in the reign of George II. 

The University of Oxford had conferred upon 
Seabury the degree of Doctor of Sacred Theology, 
December 15, 1777. 

He died suddenly February 25, 1796, in the 67th 
year of his age. His bodily remains are buried in 
the crypt, beneath St. James' Church, New Lon- 
don, in the State of Connecticut: honored by the 
reverence of that diocese of which he was the first 



appenntceis 51 

Bishop, and by a people who have learned to esteem 
and respect him as citizen and prelate. 

Somewhat at a hazard of delivering a " discourse," 
I have taxed your attention maybe more than your 
kindness meant to incur: but, feeling the impor- 
tance of the occasion to the English and American 
Church, I have not hesitated to exceed rather than 
fall short of what could be expected : and once 
again, thanking you for the permission on w^hich I 
have written to you, 

I am, my dear Dean Church, 

With great esteem and respect, 

Yours faithfully, 

Geo. Shea. 

To the Very Rev. R. W. Church, D. D., 
Dean of St. Paul's, London. 



Page 30. 

The Deanery, St. Paul's, September 17, 1884. 

My dear Mr. Justice Shea, — I have waited to 
acknowledge your letter till I could tell you some- 
thing about the subject of it. I am able now to 
tell you that we hope to have a Commemoration 
Service at St. Paul's on November 14; and, further, 
that the Archbishop of Canterbury has gladly con- 
sented to preach on the occasion. I enclose his 
note. 

You shall hear more when details are arranged; 
but everybody is still out of town. 

Thank you for the paper which you were so good 
as to send me, and of which I sent one copy to the 
Archbishop. 

Yours very faithfully, 

R. W. Church. 



52 appentJicejs 

{^Enclosed in above letter.) 
Addington Park, Croydon, September 12, 1884. 
My dear Mr. Dean, — The 14th of November 
was engaged, but I felt that I must not say no to 
such a request of yours. I will therefore, God will- 
ing, preach on anniversary of Seabury's consecration. 
I heartily trust that you are better for your holi- 
day, and that Mrs. Church and you all are well. 
Ever affectionately yours, 

Edw. Cantuar. 



Page 25. 

Newport, R. I., September 30, 1884. 

My dear Judge Shea, — Your note has just 
reached me here, and I shall be at your service on 
Friday, October 3d, between 11 a. m. and i p. m., at 
96 Fourth Ave., New York. 

Very respectfully yours, 

H. C. Potter. 



Page 2S. 

New York, October 4, 1884. 

Right Rev. and dear Sir, — It is a happy satis- 
faction for me to communicate to you, that I have 
received a letter, dated September 17, 1884, from 
the Very Rev. R. W. Church, the Dean of St. 
Paul's, London, enclosing a note to him from His 
Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, which inform 
me that, on November 14 next, the centennial anni- 
versary of the consecration of the Rev. Samuel Sea- 
bury, it is purposed to celebrate by an appropriate 
special service in St Paul's Cathedral that command- 
ing event in the history of the Church. I enclose 
copies of those letters. 



9ppenl)icej5 53 

You will notice — though from Dean Church's 
letter all the proceedings are not yet arranged — 
that the Archbishop himself will preach the anniver- 
sary sermon. 

The proposed celebration is in recognition of the 
epoch in the Church which had its beginning in 
the fact of the consecration of Bishop Seabury as the 
first American Bishop. It springs from an unforced 
and fraternal accord, and from those highest in ven^ 
eration and authority in The Church of England, 
Perhaps no official communication of this intention 
m.ay be expected by our side, and from, what now 
seem to m,e obvious reasons. Indeed, I apprehend 
that the information of which I have spoken is sent 
to me entirely in a personal and informal spirit, and 
because I have had, through friendly conversations 
with Dean Church and with Canon Liddon, some 
relation to those impulses which have secured proper 
notice in England to the approaching anniversary. 

Therefore — as no formal communication can be 
surely expected, owing to what may be thought pro- 
prieties peculiar to such voluntary homage, and as 
it must be assumed that a thing so important and 
valuable to an American Churchman cannot be 
meant for me only — I infer it is my duty, even at 
the risk of being open to the charge of intruding 
my own name on so great an occasion, to call, in 
this manner, the attention of the Bishop of New 
York to that which has been written to me. 

With much esteem and respect, 

I am, my dear Bishop, 

Yours most faithfully, 

Geo. Shea. 

To the Right Rev. Horatio Potter, D. D., 
Bishop of New York. 



54 appenDtce? 

Page 2S. 
Hob ART College, Geneva, October i6, 1884. 

My dear Chief Justice Shea, — Owing to my 
absence from home, I have been hindered from 
acknowledging your letter until now. I am greatly 
indebted to you for all that you send me, and shall 
take the liberty, in accordance with your kind per- 
mission, of giving your letter addressed to me to the 
press, so soon as I can arrange for some appropriate 
observance of November 14th in New York. My 
ow^n idea is that it would be an admirable arrange- 
ment to have the service in old Trinity, and ask Dr. 
Dix to repeat the sermon he preached in Scotland. 
How does this strike you ? 

Once more let me thank you for your letter and 
the copy of your most interesting communication to 
the Dean of St. Paul's, which accompanied it ; and 
believe me, my dear Mr. Chief Justice, 

Very faithfully yours, 

H. C. Potter. 



Pages 25, 26. 
3 Amen Court, St. Paul's, E. C, October 7, 1884. 

Dear Mr. Justice Shea, — Of your two very wel- 
come letters, the earlier and longer reached me in 
Munich. The second awaits me on my return 
home. 

The Dean of St. Paul's will, I hope, take some 
measures for carrying out your wishes in November. 
I fear that I may, too, probably miss Dr. Seabury, 
as I am obliged to go into Gloucestershire and then 
to Oxford, almost immediately. But I hope that 
this may not be so. 



appenniceg 55 

With our kindest regards to Mrs. Shea, pray 
believe me, 

Always yours most truly, 

H. P. LiDDON. 

Mr. Justice Shea. 



Page 25. 

New York, October 31, 1884. 

Very Rev. and dear Dean Church, — Yours of 
the 1 7th of last month, enclosing the note from His 
Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, came in course 
to me. Soon after I called personally on the Bishop 
of New York and on the Assistant Bishop, with 
each of whom I have the happiness to be in friendly 
intercourse ; and, entirely unofficially of course, com- 
municated to them the intelligence that you pur- 
posed to have such a special service in St. Paul's on 
the centennial, and that the Archbishop had con- 
sented to preach an anniversary sermon. It has 
effected a profound and grateful impression with us, 
and the international results for our common good 
as Churchmen are likely to exceed even our sanguine 
anticipations. 

Our own special service for the occasion will be 
held at our old Trinity, in this city ; and the Bishop 
of Connecticut (Dr. Williams) will preach the anni- 
versary sermon. He is just back from the centenary 
festival held at Aberdeen. 

I await with pleasing expectation the order of pro- 
ceedings for the service at St. Paul's, which order 
you so kindly promise to send to me. 

On the day of the anniversary it is likely you will 



56 appenDicejs 

receive from us a cable message appropriate to the 
time. 

With great esteem and respect, 

Yours very faithfully, 

Geo. Shea. 

To the Very Rev. Dean Church, D. D. 



Pages 26, 30. 
The Deanery, St. Paul's, November 4, 1884. 

My dear Judge Shea, — I write a line, before I 
leave home for a few days, to tell you that all is 
settled for November 14. I hoped to have sent you 
with my letter a copy of the Service, but it is not 
ready for the printer. I send you the Special 
Psalms, Lessons, and Collects, all of Dr. Liddon's 
selection. As I told you, the Archbishop will 
preach. We hope to have all your Bishops who 
are now in England : Albany, Minnesota, and Fond 
du Lac. I hope also that four if not five of the 
Scotch Bishops will take part — Aberdeen, Argyle, 
Breslin, and Edinburgh — the other three are in- 
capacitated by bad health ; and I hope we shall 
have a good muster of American churchmen. I 
have asked Dr. Seabury to read the Gospel. Of 
course there is the disadvantage of its being a sup- 
plementary commemoration, after the Aberdeen one. 
But I hope you will accept it as an evidence of our 
sympathy; and of the great and happy changes 
which a hundred years have wrought in the ideas 
and feeling of Churchmen on both sides of the 
water, and not of Churchmen only, but of the two 
peoples who speak the English tongue. 

You will remember us on the 14th. 

Yours very faithfully, 

R. W. Church. 



I 



atppenniceiei 57 

{Canon Liddon^s Selection, enclosed in above letter.) 

Proper Psalms. — Ps. i, 127, 133, 147. 

First Lesson. — Deuteronomy xxix. 9-29. 

Second Lesson. — Titus i. 5-9. 

Collect (as in consecration of Bishops). 

Epistle. — Acts xx. 17 (as in consecration of Bishops). 

Gospel. — St. John xx. 19 (as in consecration of Bishops). 



Pages 26, 30, 31. 
The Deanery, St. Paul's, November 15, 1884. 

My dear Judge Shea, — We had our Service 
yesterday: I think it made an impression on all 
there, and it is commented on with much friendly 
sympathy by the " Times," which does not always 
show such honor to St. Paul's. I will send you the 
Form of Service, in which the Lessons and Psalms 
were chosen by Dr. Liddon. The Archbishop 
preached a striking sermon, bolder and more frank 
in its tone than we have heard recently from Arch- 
bishops — a reparation for the weakness and stag- 
nancy of 1 784. There was a long line of Bishops 
in the procession ; American, Scotch, English, Colo- 
nial, mixed fraternally according to the order of 
their consecration ; — they were seated in the Sacra- 
rium; and the administration was by two English, 
London and Durham ; two American, Minnesota 
and Albany; and two Scotch, Edinburgh and Glas- 
gow. There were three American Bishops — I wish 
we had more, but they were gone — five Scotch, and 
the rest up to the number of twenty-eight (I believe), 
English and Colonial : among them, besides those I 
have mentioned, Ely, Oxford, Lichfield, Chichester, 
Rochester, Truro, St. Alban's, Moritzburg, Nassau. 
Dr. Seabury was gospeller, and read the Gospel. 
Fond du Lac made the third American Bishop. I 



58 appettnicejs 

invited the American Minister, and he came and sat 
in the choir, opposite to the Archbishop. Dr. Liddon 
was there. The Dome and Choir were quite full. 

I tell you this, because you are the one person 
to whom the idea of this Commemoration, which 
many of us look at as a historical event, is entirely 
due. When you proposed it to me in the summer, 
I had not thought of it; and all that I did was to 
approach the Archbishop, who received the proposal 
with the most cordial sympathy, and put off another 
engagement to take his part in it. I hope you 
will let me thank you as a benefactor to both our 
Churches. 

Yours gratefully and faithfully, 

R. W. Church. 



Page ly. 

London, November 15, 1884. 

Dear Judge, — Only a line in the few minutes 
before the mail closes to tell you that your pro- 
gramme at St. Paul's was completely carried out and 
most successfully. 

The Service was beyond everything I ever saw, 
and the Archbishop's sermon was equal to the occa- 
sion, and that is saying a good deal. 

All of his sermon has mind and force, and showed 
mastery of his subject and of the history pertain- 
ing to it; but he evidently was enkindled with 
enthusiasm about Bishop Seabury. He quoted 
your words, remarking of Bishop Seabury : " ' He 
has been well described as a simple, grand, concili- 
ating, but uncompromising man,' and his portrait 
shows a face which indicates him to have been 
worthy of the double antithesis." 



9ippent)icej5 59 

Your friend Lord Truro has behaved most kindly 
to us. We dined with him last night. I spent last 
Sunday at Addington Park with the Archbishop 
very pleasantly ; lots of talk I hope to have with 
you, if it please God to bring us home safely. Kind 
regards to Mrs. Shea and your children, and 
I am as ever, 

Yours affectionately, 

W. J. Seabury. 
Hon. George Shea. 



Pages 20, 21, 26. 



HiGHCLERC Castle, November 28, 1884. 

My dear Mr. Justice Shea, — I have been hop- 
ing to write to you ever since November 14th, but 
have been prevented by a variety of occupations and 
interruptions. By this time you will have heard, 
perhaps even from some who were present, an ac- 
count of what took place. The general impression 
here was that the occasion was one for serious thank- 
fulness to God. No doubt many details might have 
been better managed ; but the pervading spirit was 
excellent, and the Archbishop's sermon in harmony 
with it, generally speaking ; although I wish he had 
been able to state briefly, but firmly, the nature and 
necessity of the truth which was the inspiring motive 
of Bishop Seabury 's courageous act. He took it for 
granted ; but, in view of the great ignorance of the 
mass of people on religious subjects, something more 
explicit would have been welcome. I almost fear 
that it may seem ungrateful to His Grace to write 
in this way, but I wish to be perfectly honest when 
writing to you. 

My only disappointment was that I missed seeing 



6o appent>ice0 

Dr. Seabury, except in the distance. He called at 
my house when I was out of town ; and I had to 
leave London again on the 14th, immediately after 
the service at St. Paul's. I had the satisfaction of 
hearing him read the Gospel in a clear, fine voice — 
an incident in the day's proceedings which com- 
manded general interest. 

This letter requires no reply whatever, and will 
conclude by my assuring you that I am, 
Dear Mr. Justice Shea, 

Yours most truly, 

H. P. LiDDON. 

Pray make my kind respects to Mrs. Shea and 
the Misses Shea. 



NOVEMBER 14, 1884. 



A SPECIAL SERVICE 



OF 



COMMEMORATION 



Held in 



ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL, 

At the request of the American Bishops representing the 

Sixty-five Dioceses of the Church in the United States which 

have sprung of Seabury's line. 



Ci^e i^olt Commttttion 

Celebrated at ii a. m. 
THE SERMON 

Preached by His Grace the 

ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY, 

And the Offertory appropriated by the Dean and 

Chapter to 

€ht S)ottet? for tl)e {propagation of tit (Bogj^tl in 
iPoreiffn |)artfi;. 



Ct)e Sermon 



PREACHED IN ST. PAUL'S 

BY 

THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY. 



Deep calleth unto Deep." 



" Let the Lord, the God of the spirits of all fleshy set a man over the 
congregation . . . that the congregation of the Lord be not as sheep 
which have no shepherd!'"' — Numbers xxvii. i6, 17. 

A WARRIOR-STATESMAN was the gift which the law- 
giver prayed his God to give Israel. He besought 
Him as "God of the spirits of all flesh," because 
he knew how through the gift of a great man God 
touches man's spirit, wins the enthusiasm and the im- 
agination and the firm resolve of multitudes to any en- 
terprise He has in hand for them to execute. It was 
no warrior-prince of whom Christ was thinking when 
this text of the Old Testament recurred to His mem- 
ory in all the pathos of its fulfilling. He too saw the 
multitudes and had compassion, yearned upon them, 
because they were "rent and tossed about "^ as sheep 
that have no shepherd. What Moses dreaded for 
his people in the deserts, Christ found to be the case 
of His people amid their towns. And because He 
was God of the spirits of all flesh. He knew how 

1 eaKvlfZEvot Koi e/!)^L/ifjevoL, St. Matt. ix. 36. 



64 appenlitceis 

many hard hearts as well as broken hearts, how many 
seemingly proud spirits as well as contrite ones, 
needed in reality to be gathered and comforted. And 
so, we read, " He called to Him His disciples and 
gave them authority," — gave them shepherds, and 
not warriors, spiritual men " to go out before them 
and to go in before them, and to lead them out, and 
to bring them in " — and " He gave them authority." 
In general, it is strange to notice how the needs, 
sufferings, and aspirations of people, taken together 
in a mass, awaken little feeling, to speak of, in propor- 
tion to the interest we take in individuals. When 
multitudes are rich in power and prosperity, and the 
self-will of combination, then we think little of the in- 
dividual. The man or the woman, with his losses or 
her wrongs, his failure or her shame, must be crushed 
by the relentless onward tramp. Then the multi- 
tude is everything. But when the multitude itself 
suffers from faulty legislation, or from its own habits 
formed under that baleful influence, how difficult it 
has been to get their weight of misery or darkness 
considered and planned for. The labor of thousands 
for wages that mock the work, the flinging of vilest 
temptations before them in heaps in their streets, the 
bestowal of relief in ways that make idleness a career, 
the ignorance and the idolatries of tribes and nations, 
are beheld without compassion enough to move any 
but the most self-denying to the rescue. And yet the 
sorrows of an individual, even his sentimental trou- 
bles, the agitations of his mind, will at the same 
moment have for us an absorbing interest. If by any 
personification we could only place before ourselves 
the Churches of America, England, Scotland, as they 
were a century ago and had then been for half a 



appentiiceis 65 

century, pleading, pausing, succoring, like three fair 
women distracted with anxiety, with inability, with 
forbidden sympathy, the tale of those times would leave 
few cheeks unwet. But because they were merely 
multitudes, countries, Churches, in which thousands 
of minds and hearts throbbed and worked, their hopes, 
fears, and aspirations compose but a commonplace 
page of history. 

I wish to turn that old page, full of interest, ro- 
mance, intense life, and yet no tale of sentiment. It 
is an action of men, honorable men of the world. 
There is firm urgency of just demands, a manly 
patience, and, one policy failing, the dignified adop- 
tion of another. There is unity of principle with 
the greatest change of mode. I am bidden to give 
expression to this, as a call to stronger sympathy, to 
more thankful faith, to harder-strung resolution. It 
is not for me to-day to argue, still less to criticise. 
We have to encourage to action those who are fully 
persuaded in their own minds : to whom the three 
orders of ministry in the Church are Scriptural prim- 
itive essentials. For us the form of government, the 
authority, ministrations, liturgy, teaching, sacraments, 
the canon of Scripture ; again, the spiritual priest- 
hood of the laity, our bulwark against Papacy, our 
anchor amid sects, are knit all together and indisso- 
lubly attached to this unbroken historic thread. 

Anciently, the vital value of this thread to the life 
of the Church was understood so well that the model 
persecutor Decius, whose characteristic was " his 
knowledge and foresight on every subject," when he 
entered on his enterprise of suppressing the Church, 
published simply an edict against the Bishops. For 
modern England, the whole thought of the practical 



66 appentiiceis 

life of the Church is so tied up to our triple ministry, 
that, whenever this Church of ours has lacked Epis- 
copacy, in our colonies or on our Mission field, the 
work has languished. Wherever it is established 
the work both spreads and deepens. This result 
may be ascribed (by those who will) to the mere fact 
that our organizations have received such an impress 
of Episcopacy that without it they are imperfect 
and so become unfruitful. There are other ways of 
accounting for it also, which (as I said) we need 
not discuss ; but the fact is patent and its leading 
evident. 

And now, on this Commemoration Day, may I tell 
the tale of what we commemorate ? It will not take 
long; but seeing that some of our largest popular 
histories are innocent of the least mention of it, I 
would fain tell it over like some household memory 
at this gathering of the families. 

Our great American colonies and states had, partly 
from their antecedents, partly by policies here, been 
kept until a century ago dependent for their Church 
government, as for other things, on England. Three 
thousand miles of ocean was a wide space between 
Christian flocks and their Bishops. Ordinations 
were only in England — at heavy cost — not without 
many perils. Confirmations were none. Ruling and 
direction such as we may imagine. Little by little 
the Church was drooping into decay. Indeed it was 
in captivity — in fragments. " Our scattered, wander- 
ing, and sinking Church " are the pathetic words in 
which they described their own condition. Some of 
the congregations had grown indifferent. Some of 
the political leaders were bitterly hostile. Fatal remi- 
niscences made many religious people implacable. 



appentiicejS 67 

Religious organization was employed not to pro- 
mote religion, but to assail the Church. Let me illus- 
trate from a contemporary letter the efforts, whose 
utter failure may comfort some failing spirit disposed 
to quail at what it fancies to be " signs of the times." 
It refers to as much as thirty years before the date 
we speak of. " Even then it was evident from the con- 
tinued publications in the newspapers, and from the 
unity of all the jarring interests of Independents, and 
Presbyterians, from Massachusetts to Georgia, under 
grand committees and synods, that some mischievous 
action was meditated against the Church." Many 
had labored, many had suffered for the ever baffled 
hope of completing the truncated constitution of their 
Church. When at last the great severance came 
there were two voices from her Churchmen. One 
was of despair. " Now every hope is over, we can 
never inherit the succession of the fatherland. We 
must elect to ourselves men whom we can make titular 
nominal Bishops for good order's sake. The oil of 
Aaron must be done without — it is denied us for 
ever." The other cry invoked hope even against 
hope. They appealed yet again to the Bishops of 
England. " If you could not give us your succession 
before, when we were fellow-subjects, because British 
legislation had given you no enabling power on our 
behalf, then at least bestow it on us now as fellow- 
Christians, yes, fellow-Churchmen, whom no war can 
sever from unity in Christ, whom no statutes now 
afflict with disability." There was no answer. The 
moment is thus described by a contemporary with 
a not intemperate indignation. " I am at a loss to 
understand why considerations of a purely political 
kind should have had such enervating influence on 



68 appenDices 

the English Bishops as to render them passive spec- 
tators of the destitution of their American children." 
It seemed to some as if, half living flesh, half marble, 
like the stricken priests in the Arabian tale we filled 
our chairs, feeling willing, but motionless. We know 
now how some hearts had long been beating high to 
help.^ How Tenison, Gibson, Butler, Sherlock, 
Seeker, Terrick, Lowth, had given means and had 
given toil, had reasoned with men and prayed to God, 
how a Berkeley had sacrificed all that he had for the 
hope of obtaining pastors for them. 

There are those who think it the point of honor 
with sons to " sling at their fathers and not miss." I 
pray rather that we may overcome some difficulties 
of our own, before which we stand halting, as fairly 
as they mastered theirs. Think of Statutes which 
tacitly precluded the imparting of our Church con- 
stitution to the children of our Church; immense 
legal ingenuity closing every avenue to independence ; 
a throne foreign to our Church, only slowly grow- 
ing amicable to her; memories which made the 
whole nation revolt from the thought of the Crown's 
exercising a dispensing power ; cabinets which ac- 
counted the offices of the Church to be the cheapest 
bribes they could offer to the world, and thought it 
a feat of " wisdom " to have silenced Convocation. 
When we are so sure that we should not have been 
as our fathers, a few candid minutes spent in consid- 
ering what has become of the leaden weights which 
oppressed them and who removed them, might leave 
us doubtful in another sense whether we shall here- 
after deserve such thanks as we owe to them. 

^ See the Bishop of St. Andrews' Address (Blackwood, 1884), p. 12. 
Archbishop Tenison died a. d. 1715, Bishop Lowth, 1787. 



appentiicejai 69 

When at last revolution might seem to have burst 
the bonds, there appeared a fresh illegality in duty 
and charity ; to adapt the letter to the spirit of the 
service-book was impossible ; the oath to the Eng- 
lish Sovereign was essential to the consecration of a 
Bishop by Bishops. An episcopal Church seemed 
compelled to compel an episcopal Church to be Pres- 
byterian. Say rather a crisis seemed at hand when 
prelates would once more have to choose between 
the law of man and the Gospel of Christ. I for one 
am certain how such men would have chosen had it 
come to this. But once more in the Church's history 
God committed deliverance not to the strong but to 
the smallest and feeblest of all. 

The third person of the drama, the Church once 
" of Scotland," was in the dust. Her Officers and 
her Offices lay under terrible disabilities. Legisla- 
tion had recently attempted to annihilate even what 
a writer of the times properly called " her shattered 
remains. ^ " She worshipped under penal statutes, 
the more insulting because no one would now have 
executed them. Still she could not emerge from 
back streets and upper floors. And the poor rem- 
nant of her Bishops, four in number, lived, driven 
into one diocese, in poverty and in piety. 

Her very existence was a breach of law, like that 
of a Church of the first days under a humane em- 
peror. Her holiest acts were offences, the more 
sacred the more criminal. She was asked to under- 
take what the Church of England was not strong 
enough to effect. And thus she answered in the 
person of one of her poor prelates : " Considering 

^ Bishop Jolly, Letter to Bishop Ke7np j Documents issued by the 
Historical Club of the American Churchy No. 19. 



70 appenDicejs 

the great depositum committed to us, I do not see 
how we can account to our great Lord and Master if 
we neglect such an opportunity of promoting His 
truth and enlarging the borders of His Church." So 
then, while the new States eyed Episcopacy with a 
suspicious hate that had its roots in the past, and be- 
lieved it to be irreconcilable with the interests of a 
Republic, little knowing what strength it had lent to 
every form of government in its turn ; while the idea 
of it seemed, alas 1 so lost in State-craft that even the 
Church of America itself partly doubted for a while 
whether its orders were certainly valid, as having 
been conferred without the consent of a State ; while 
a proposal was being ventilated for a nominal Epis- 
copacy created by lay and clerical votes ; while our 
Lord Chancellor was instructing the House of Lords 
that the Episcopal clergy for other countries should 
be ordained by English and Irish prelates only — 
while such were the " counsels of princes," the feeble 
remnant in Scotland was quietly facing the crisis of 
the Church of the future. Humbly and peacefully, 
with knowledge of what they were doing, they laid 
their hands on the chosen man in an upper cham- 
ber, and imparted to the New World the gift of " a 
free, valid and purely ecclesiastical Episcopacy." 
These were their own words, " free, valid, and purely 
ecclesiastical." It is no wonder that those ringing 
words sound again and again in the letters of that 
time, and that they were incorporated in the " beloved 
concordat " which ruled the relations of Scotland and 
America. 

The man, too, was worthy for whom they should 
do this. He has been characterized as "a simple, 
grand, conciliatory, uncompromising man."^ His 

1 Chief Justice Shea. 



noble portrait answers to the double antithesis. The 
expression is gentle of features which have no slight 
stamp of the heroic. He had the courage of humil- 
ity. He was honest, patient, ready to put himself 
out of sight if the cause could be better served by his 
being forgotten. The gifts which rouse personal en- 
thusiasm seldom accompany so solid a nature. Yet 
we read (strangely as it sounds) that his preaching 
" to an amazing throng of people on the Atonement 
was so striking that it was almost impossible to re- 
strain the audience from loud shouts of approbation." 
Conciliation without compromise, the yielding un- 
yielding presence of an elastic spring, never with- 
drawn, never rigid, is the image of his action. He 
had known what it was to suffer for his opinions and 
his courage. He had been seized by armed men, 
dragged some seventy miles, paraded through the 
streets, lain six weeks in gaol, his home pillaged, his 
children beaten, himself left destitute. No bitter- 
ness broke from him. Injustice strengthened his 
purpose and nourished his sweetness. " I am deter- 
mined," he writes, on his return, " to stay here as 
long as I am permitted to discharge the duties of my 
Mission, whatever personal inconvenience it may sub- 
ject me to. It is God's property to bring order out 
of confusion, good out of evil, and may His will be 
done." 

" Nulla ecclesia sine episcopo " was the motto 
which he early placed under his shield, looking on 
the vastness of his country, ^ divining its grandeur, 

1 " The union of the Church of England and the Episcopal Church 
of America . . . must be of great advantage to the Church in Amer- 
ica, and may also be so at some future period to the Church of Eng- 
land." — Bishop Seaburfs Letter to the Society for the Propagation of 
the Gospel^ Feb. 27, 1784. 



72 appenaice0 

inspired with the sense of his Church's future, and 
certain that it was all in all for her that her primi- 
ticB should ht primitives ; her first fruits like those of 
the first days. 

The revenges of God are orderly and beautiful. 
They light on men and places with an exactitude we 
cannot mistake. Seabury's first sermon as Bishop 
in his own land was preached in the pulpit of Bishop 
Berkeley, ^ our own Confessor for the American 
Church. The State whose gaol inflicted his humili- 
ation was Connecticut ; he reentered its chief city as 
its chief pastor and Father in God. But in deeper 
things than mere outward arresting signs we realize 
the presence and unity of God's purpose. Surely it 
was a great honor, a broad seal of His own, which 
was put on the Church of America for ever in these 
events by God, that she should have been turned 
back from the grand portals which were close to her 
and bidden to enter by so strait a gate on the won- 
drous inheritance of which but a small part even now 
is hers. What had hindered that the purposes of her 
first founders should be fulfilled ? How was it she 
was not born to great endowments 1 Why not at 
least to her natural position of establishment with its 
great opportunities and great obligations } Why did 
not the full stream of the English Church flow in on 
her, and advance smooth and broad, evenly with the 
population and the institutions } It can surely have 
been only because the first mark of sonship in spir- 
itual life is chastisement — because the mother of 
power is humility — because the yoke is borne in 
youth by all those whose manhood is free indeed. Is 
it possible that a really great Church should be able 

1 At Newport. 



to enter into the secret of her apostleship without the 
searching, fiery disciplines which have seared with 
pain the whole frame of the Church, not only in her 
first days, but wherever she has made a new begin- 
ning, or reasserted herself in her purity ? It is not 
for her to move on in the dauntless, heedless pride 
of nations born in a day. She must not be deceived 
into receiving kingdoms and the glory of them as a 
free gift. She must conquer them by some conform- 
ity to the Passion of her Lord. No surer token has 
any Church ever received that He is the same yes- 
terday, to-day, and for ever, than the Church of 
America — destined within a century to found her 
sixty-seven sees — received in being, against all an- 
ticipations or probabilities, constrained to begin from 
the very beginning, stripped of essentials, and thank- 
ful to receive them from the least and most " suffer- 
ing Church " ^ of the whole earth. 

Church of America ! Because the Lord loved thee. 
He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, that 
He might prove thee. Lovingly, and according to 
thy strength. He laid His Cross upon thee, hi hoc 
signo vinces. 

And now there are three simple lessons which, it 
seems to me, the holy joyfulness of the chain of greet- 
ings from Woodbury to Aberdeen, and the sober 
splendors of this our solemn anniversary, lay upon 
the heart and memory of our Churches until the 
next centenary shall come round with perhaps wholly 
new lessons. 

L The first is patience : Church patience ; patience 
with God : the patience of a waiting spouse, growing 
more intensely His by reason of anxiety; less and 

^ Dr. Berkeley, Beardsley's Life of Seabury (London, Hodges, p. 105). 



74 appenniceg 

less able to think of anything but His coming — and 
utterly sure of Him. To fast, to pray, to implore 
His presence, to watch for sound or token. But 
never, never to do that which it is His prerogative to 
do at His own time. Never to take what it is His 
to give. 

There is something thrilling in the last quarter of 
the year 1784. Years of prayer and waiting had 
gone by; tears and suffering had been spent; and 
still there was no sign. And one great leader of 
religious feeling lost patience. He had set stagnant 
waters flowing in channels new and old. He had 
rekindled slumbering sparks of devotion. He had 
organized languor and torpor into life. For Amer- 
ica how he had prayed and labored. Church order 
had been his first yearning, America his first field. 
How he had trusted that the English Church would 
give her Bishops, complete her structure and her 
powers. At last he would wait no longer. His own 
end could not be very distant. Was he to die and 
leave her still without a deacon, priest, or bishop of 
her own, without Consecrations, without the binding 
seal and stirring grace of Confirmation ? No sooner 
had he answered that question in his own way by 
his own act than the clouds removed. What he did 
is well known. And he did it in that memorable 
year 1784, on the 2d of September. On the 14th 
of November Seabury was consecrated. 

After an interval of less than eleven weeks Amer- 
ica possessed the " free, valid, and purely ecclesiasti- 
cal supremacy " for which John Wesley prayed but 
for which he would not wait. 

II. It is a lesson in being content with the essence, 
and despising the most desirable accompaniments, 



appenDice^ 75 

whenever true solutions of Church problems present 
themselves. It teaches us the true value to the 
Church of the " present difficulty," whatever it be. 
The supreme importance of solving it rightly and 
of waiting till some right solution comes, but also of 
accepting whatever legitimate solution becomes pos- 
sible in God's providence, even though the accom- 
paniments of it fall far short of what we hoped. 

The most fruitful of thinkers tells us that his 
method was to set before himself with the utmost 
clearness the conditions of his problem — to hold 
them, as it were, in solution in his mind, and keep 
them constantly present to himself, and that then 
gradually light dawned. The wisdom of Church- 
men in dealing with many Church problems is the 
same — to keep the conditions steadily before them 
until light dawns. There were at that time two 
leading conditions. They had to continue the Church 
on the primitive model ; they had to win men into 
Christ. There was the continuous building, con- 
struction, extension — "edification" St. Paul calls it 
— of the Church on the Apostolic plan only; no 
obliteration permissible. There was the conciliation 
of men through studying the spirit of the age, under- 
standing it, reckoning with it. 

We may not depart from the ancient ground plan, 
the vision shown in the Mount, or we shall find our- 
selves building a Babylon, not a Sion. We may not 
give up the " persuading of men," " the commending 
ourselves to all men," or we shall find ourselves build- 
ing void sanctuaries and desolate cloisters. The 
American fathers looked to something beyond, the 
establishing themselves in popular estimation at a 
time when English Churchmanship was on all sides 



76 appenuiceis 

thought incompatible with fresh forms of government. 
They would not please men at the cost of abandon- 
ing the catholic exemplar. They would not please 
themselves. They had longed to receive the institu- 
tion they desired invested with the prestige, the deep 
grandeur, the solemnities of their mother Church. 
But, dear as those were to them (how dear let the 
Christian ballads of their Church Poet witness) ; dear 
as they were, it was not those which they desired, 
but the inner soul and core of the primaeval rule. 
And this dwelt as well with poverty and the 
world's spite in an upper room as in the glorious 
gloom of a Westminster, or by the solidity of deep- 
founded thrones. It was poverty, it was confessor- 
ship, it was almost outlawry, which offered them the 
answer of God, and they took it with tears of joy. 
They were fain to seek God's kingdom in Christ's 
way, and presently all else was added to them. 

III. The third lesson is that the dawn we spoke 
of came, and that always it must come, through the 
inherent power of high principles — a firm faith in 
the possibility of distinguishing better from worse, a 
fast hold of what has been committed to us, however 
scorned or attacked. It is not noisy proclamation 
which works. The leaven and the seed are the types 
of the kingdom. An intense force resides in any 
single living truth, held, spoken, lived in simplicity. 
In the quiet, unenthusiastic style of the time Arch- 
bishop Seeker had years before described the need 
of more outspoken doctrine and fuller expression of 
Church thought. Some might smile at the extreme 
moderation of his tone ; but it may be remembered 
that it was an age in which " enthusiasm " was the 
equivalent term for fanaticism: when young clergy 



appenntces ^^ 

were counselled not to dwell too much on the work 
of the Holy Spirit ; and the town was placarded with 
terror of Rome because Bishop Porteus recommended 
that Good Friday should be observed. In 1760 then 
Seeker writes — "It hath been a pretty general de- 
fect among us that we have not insisted sufficiently 
in our discourses on the peculiar doctrines of Chris- 
tianity, nor enforced sufficiently our practical exhor- 
tations with peculiarly Christian motives. We 
[should] dwell oftener on the fallen condition of men, 
on the efficacy of faith, and the necessity of sancti- 
fying grace. " ^ Again, " No one hath more at heart 
the establishment of Bishops in America. Few per- 
sons, if any, have taken more pains to convince those 
on whom it depends of the need and usefulness of it. 
But the time for it is not yet come. God grant it 
may soon. . . . Dispose the laity to desire it." Truly 
no leaven was ever at work more noiselessly. But it 
did work. And because it was true seed, it mattered 
not that it was the least of seeds. Who would have 
believed that the faithful action of the Scottish Bish- 
ops on so small a scale would have been followed in 
eighteen months by the Act of Parliament^ which 
gave in fullest measure all that had ever been desired, 
all that for high reasons of State the great ministers 
of Great Britain had again and again refused. So, 
when Cyprian in the unlawful assembly of his Bish- 
ops at Carthage quietly sketched the course they 
would adopt and then wait for the judgment of the 
" Lord Jesus Christ " upon it, " Who singly and 

1 Archbishop Seeker, Letter to Dr. Smith., October 12, 1760, His- 
torical Docwnents (7). 

2 " We should never have obtained the succession from England, had 
he (Bishop Seabury) or some other not have obtained it first from Scot- 
land." — Mr. Parker of Boston, ap. Beardsley, p. 211. 



78 appennicejs 

alone " (said he) " hath the power to advance us in 
the governance of His Church, and pass judgment 
upon our action,"^ — when he so said, Episcopacy 
was ready to take its place (nay, may it not be said to 
have taken its place already ?) among the institutions 
of the Roman Empire. It had only now to be rec- 
ognized. Every confiscation, every martyrdom, only 
secured it a higher, firmer footing. 

But, oh, brethren, it is not for Episcopacy's sake 
that we keep this festival together. That is, indeed, 
the heading of the one page we have turned to-day. 
But the glory of Catholic religion is, while giving full 
meaning and efficacy to every organic detail, still 
never to confuse the organs with the body or with 
the life. The organs are not the Church. The 
Church is not for the organs ; but the organs are for 
the Church and the Gospel, for the Christ of the 
Gospel and of the Church. It is just because He is 
all in all to us ; because He is not only above every- 
thing to us, but is in everything and everything in 
Him, that we are able to insist on the presence of 
His Divine power in all His institutions and all their 
operation. 

One versed in human nature, one who can speak 
of his experience of men as ranging from the Canton 
to the Hudson's river, said the other day that what 
all his experience led him most to urge was " the be- 
lief in an attainable high standard of morality for all 
men." " Disbelief," he said, ^ " in that attainable 
high standard of morality was at the root of interna- 
tional hatreds and hostilities," " making men suspi- 
cious of their fellows." Where there is no faith in 

^ Sentt. Epp. Syn. Carth. sub Cyp. vii. " Cyprianus dixit," etc. 
2 Sir F. Goldsmid, Carlisle Church Congress, 1884. 



man there can be no faith in God. Where there is 
no love of God there is no love of souls. To us that 
faith in the attainable high morality of all men is 
simply faith in Christ. We believe that all men can 
have Him and all in Him. The faith of Christ is no 
longer a progressive school of thought. The faith 
is already face to face with mankind in all lands. 
Within the Church, those evangelical teachings of 
which great Churchmen a hundred years ago spoke 
as nearly ignored have had free course. Doctrines 
yet closer to our Lord's own Person, the fullness with 
which His Incarnation charges all thoughts, all 
things, the abundance of His Atonement, His Resur- 
rection Life are (we have reason to know) closer to 
the hearts of men. His Presence grows more of a 
reality to many lives. History, criticism, science, 
have not been at work in vain. They have intro- 
duced higher intelligence, deeper reality into our 
grasp of doctrine. His Person and His present Life 
have a known felt power. Without the doctrine 
faith is not Christian faith, morals are but heathen 
morals. We know the worth and work not only of 
the old ethics, but of the old worships. But when 
their all was spent Christ came. It was the fullness 
of time. Time was ripe for Him, the world was 
ready, and we too have reached a crisis of history 
when the full, brimming Church is able to deal with 
every race, to pour the faith of Christ over the whole 
earth. It is the history of England and of America 
which reveals the prospect. Not their ecclesiastical 
history alone (although Seabury's successors are a 
hundred and thirty-nine, and the seven foreign bish- 
oprics which depended on England have become 
seventy-five since our Queen began to reign), but the 



8o appentiiceg 

far wider aspects and preparations of their past. 
From what basis was England's place in the world of 
empire won ? Once she called nothing her own but 
her situation only. Geographical position — she pos- 
sessed nothing else. She literally fulfilled the boast 
of the ancient mathematician, " Give me a place to 
stand on and I will move the earth." She had a 
rock-pedestal in the world of waters and no more. 
But the history of America opens out in an age when 
continental areas, lately intractable for vastness, are 
by mere acceleration of movement endowed with all 
the facilities of smallness. The Atlantic and Pacific 
shores are not so far apart as once our own channels 
were. And to this add all things without limit — 
territory unlimited — nations born in an hour to peo- 
ple it — difficulties overwhelming, yet practically no 
limit to the resources which believing populations 
can devote to the Master's service. 

Two dangers to religion might have been feared 
within. You might have been tempted to a selfish 
despair, " no hope of evangelizing such multitudes — 
therefore confine all work to home — be content to 
be a pure primitive sect," — or that other temptation 
of the multitude, " regard the corporate life only — 
the individualizing of souls is not your vocation." 
The divine instinct which moves you to covet those 
two titles, " The most missionary Church," " The 
Church of the poorest," saves and will save you from 
both temptations. 

The " high attainable standard," then, it is ours to 
advance. We are to believe that Christ is attainable 
for all souls, — or rather that all souls are attainable 
by Christ. A crisis is ours to direct such as time has 
never known before, and its very earthliest vehicle 



appentiiceis si 

and means is a language and a view of politics which 
are fast girdling the globe. Gazing on the last hun- 
dred years, with their failures and their sins, yet see- 
ing how His cause has kept advancing, not at mere 
even pace, but with accelerating velocity, and that at 
once in all directions the mind fails in attempting to 
conceive what one more Christian century will have 
worked. When our times are left as far behind as 
Seabury's are now, may we be found to have secured 
a harvest in proportion to his ! Yet it ought to be so, 
for if he is the man whom God, the God of the spir- 
its of all flesh, set up over His congregation, that the 
congregation of the Lord might not be as sheep hav- 
ing no shepherd, ours, on the other hand, is that 
Catholic Church which St. John saw ride multitudi- 
nous across the sky, conquering and to conquer. This 
is that Church which long since unhorsed the spec- 
tres of superstition that had ridden side by side with 
them out of heathenism, and has humbly striven to 
be true to Him Whose name is the Word of God. 
Oh, for soldiers to muster thick and fast behind such 
Leader! We live at a moment when zeal and self- 
denial could do anything if they would come to the 
fore ; when fiery men, hard men, who could suffer hard- 
ness, who would equip themselves to a true measure 
of fitness, who would delight in wisdom and in- 
nocence, who would be content with food and raiment, 
could work miracles. 

We dare not cease to utter the call, though our 
own call is so different a one. We abide here not 
for ease ; but they would pass like night from land to 
land. They would have strange power of speech. 
Has it not been proved ? They would teach their 
tale to ears willing and unwilling. They would leave 



82 appenuicest 

the " high attainable standard " attained behind them 
as they passed. For Christ Himself would be given 
and be received. In all humility we say it. It can- 
not be vain on Seabury's Day to say it. 



\ J^octttnentjS 



RELATING TO THE EPISCOPAr SUCCESSION 

AND THL 

CONSECRATION 

OF 

SAMUEL SEABURY. 



%^t Concortiat 



In the Name of the holy and undivided Trinity, 
Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, One God blessed 
FOR ever; Amen: — 

The wise and gracious Providence of this mercifull 
God, having put it into the hearts of the Christians 
of the Episcopal persuasion in Connecticut in North 
America, to desire that the Blessings of a free, valid 
and purely Ecclesiastical Episcopacy, might be com- 
municated to them, and a Church regularly formed 
in that part of the western world upon the most an- 
tient, and primitive Model : And application having 
been made for this purpose, by the Reverend Dr. 
Samuel Seabury, Presbyter in Connecticut, to the 
Right Reverend the Bishops of the Church in Scot- 
land : The said Bishops having taken this proposal 
into their serious Consideration, most heartily con- 
curred to promote and encourage the same, as far as 
lay in their power; and accordingly began the pious 
and good work recommended to them, by complying 
with the request of the Clergy in Connecticut, and 
advancing the said Dr. Samuel Seabury to the high 
Order of the Episcopate ; At the same time earnestly 
praying that this Work of the Lord thus hap- 
pily begun might prosper in his hands, till it should 
please the great and glorious Head of the Church, 
to increase the number of Bishops in America, and 



86 €]^e Concordat 

send forth more such Labourers into that part 
of his Harvest. — Animated with this pious hope, 
and earnestly desirous to establish a Bond of peace, 
and holy Communion, between the two Churches, 
the Bishops of the Church in Scotland, whose names 
are underwritten, having had full and free Confer- 
ence with Bishop Seabury, after his Consecration and 
Advancement as aforesaid, agreed with him on the 
following Articles, which are to serve as a Concordate, 
or Bond of Union, between the Catholic remainder 
of the antient Church of Scotland, and the now 
rising Church in the State of Connecticut. 

Art. L They agree in thankfully receiving, and 
humbly and heartily embracing the whole Doctrine 
of the Gospel, as revealed and set forth in the holy 
Scriptures : and it is their earnest and united Desire 
to maintain the Analogy of the common Faith, once 
delivered to the Saints, and happily preserved in the 
Church of Christ, thro his divine power and protec- 
tion, who promised that the Gates of Hell should 
never prevail against it. 

Art. n. They agree in believing this Church to 
be the mystical Body of Christ, of which he alone is 
the Head, and supreme Governour, and that under 
him, the chief Ministers, or Managers of the Affairs 
of this spiritual Society, are those called Bishops, 
whose Exercise of their sacred Office being indepen- 
dent on all Lay powers, it follows of consequence, 
that their spiritual Authority and Jurisdiction cannot 
be affected by any Lay-Deprivation. 

Art. HI. They agree in declaring that the Episco- 
pal Church in Connecticut is to be in full Commun- 
ion with the Episcopal Church in Scotland, it being 
their sincere Resolution to put matters on such a 



C]^e Concordat 87 

footing, as that the Members of both Churches may 
with freedom and safety communicate with either, 
when their Occasions call them from the one Country 
to the other : Only taking Care when in Scotland 
not to hold Communion in sacred Offices with those 
persons, who under pretence of Ordination by an 
English, or Irish Bishop, do, or shall take, upon 
them, to officiate as Clergymen in any part of the 
National Church of Scotland, and whom the Scottish 
Bishops cannot help looking upon, as schismatical 
Intruders, designed only to answer worldly purposes, 
and uncommissioned Disturbers of the poor Remains 
of that once flourishing Church, which both their 
predecessors and they, have, under many Difficulties, 
laboured to preserve pure and uncorrupted to future 
Ages. 

Art. IV. With a view to the salutary purpose 
mentioned in the preceding Article, they agree in 
desiring that there may be as near a Conformity 
in Worship, and Discipline established between the 
two Churches as is consistent with the different Cir- 
cumstances and Customs of Nations : And in order 
to avoid any bad effects that might otherwise arise 
from political Differences, they hereby express their 
earnest Wish and firm Intention to observe such 
prudent Generality in their public Prayers, with re- 
spect to these points, as shall appear most agreeable 
to Apostolic Rules, and the practice of the primitive 
Church. 

Art. V. As the Celebration of the holy Eucharist, 
or the Administration of the Sacrament of the Body 
and Blood of Christ, is the principal Bond of Union 
among Christians, as well as the most Solemn Act of 
Worship in the Christian Church, the Bishops afore- 



8s Cl^e ConcorDat 

said agree in desiring that there may be as little 
Variance here as possible. And tho' the Scottish 
Bishops are very far frorn prescribing to their Breth- 
ren in this matter, they cannot help ardently wishing 
that Bishop Seabury would endeavour all he can con- 
sistently with peace and prudence, to make the Cele- 
bration of this venerable Mystery conformable to the 
most primitive Doctrine and practice in that respect : 
Which is the pattern the Church of Scotland has cop- 
ied after in her Communion Office, and which it has 
been the Wish of some of the most eminent Divines 
of the Church of England that she also had more 
closely followed, than she seems to have done since 
she gave up her first reformed Liturgy used in the 
Reign of King Edward VI. ; between which, and 
the form used in the Church of Scotland, there is no 
Difference in any point, which the primitive Church 
reckoned essential to the right Ministration of the 
holy Eucharist. — In this capital Article therefore of 
the Eucharistic Service, in which the Scottish Bish- 
ops so earnestly wish for as much Unity as possible. 
Bishop Seabury also agrees to take a serious View 
of the Communion Office recommended by them, 
and if found agreeable to the genuine Standards of 
Antiquity, to give his Sanction to it, and by gentle 
Methods of Argument and Persuasion, to endeavour, 
as they have done, to introduce it by degrees into 
practice without the Compulsion of Authority on 
the one side, or the predjudice of former Custom 
on the other. 

Art. VI. It is also hereby agreed and resolved 
upon for the better answering the purposes of this 
Concordate, that a brotherly fellowship be hence- 
forth maintained between the Episcopal Churches in 



Cl^e Concordat 89 

Scotland and Connecticut, and such a mutual. Inter- 
course of Ecclesiastical Correspondence carried on, 
when Opportunity offers, or necessity requires as 
may tend to the Support, and Edification of both 
Churches. 

Art. VII. The Bishops aforesaid do hereby jointly 
declare, in the most solemn manner, that in the whole 
of this Transaction, they have nothing else in view, 
but the Glory of God, and the good of his Church ; 
And being thus pure and upright in their Intentions, 
they cannot but hope, that all whom it may concern, 
will put the most fair and candid construction on 
their Conduct, and take no Offence at their feeble, 
but sincere Endeavours to promote what they be- 
lieve to be the Cause of Truth, and of the common 
Salvation. 

In Testimony of their Love to which, and in mu- 
tual good Faith and Confidence, they have for them- 
selves, and their Successors in Ofiice cheerfully put 
their Names and Seals to these presents at Aberdeen 
this fifteenth day of November, in the year of our 
Lord, one thousand, seven hundred, and eighty-four. 
Robert Kilgour, Bishop & Primus, [seal.] 
Arthur Petrie, Bishop, [seal.] 
John Skinner, Jr., Bishop, [seal.] 
Samuel Seabury, Bishop, [seal.] 



90 Cl^e ^cot0 QBiisl^opgi 



RELATING TO THE SCOTS EPISCOPACY AS 

CONNECTED WITH THE ENGLISH EPISCOPACY, 

AND WITH THE CONSECRATION OF 

BISHOP SEABURY. 

Extract frofn the Register of Archbishop yuxon^ in 
the Library of his Grace the Archbishop of Canter- 
bury, at Lambeth Palace, — Fol. 237. 

IT appears that James Sharp was consecrated 
Archbishop of St. Andrew's — Andrew Fairfoull, 
Archbishop of Glasgow — Robert Leighton, Bishop 
of Doublenen (Dunblane) — and James Hamilton, 
Bishop of Galloway — on the 15th day of December, 
1 66 1, in St. Peter's Church, Westminster, by Gilbert, 
Bishop of London, Commissary to the Archbishop 
of Canterbury ; — and that the Right Rev. George, 
Bishop of Worcester, John, Bishop of Carlisle, and 
Hugh, Bishop of Landaff, were present and assisting. 
Extracted this 3^ day of yu7ie, 1 789, by me, 

William Dickes, Secretary. 

London, June 3^, 1789. 
THA T the above is a true copy of an extract pro- 
cured by order of Archbishop Moore, to be sent to 
Bishop Seabury, in Connecticut, is attested by us. 
Bishops of the Scottish Church, now in this place, on 
business of importance to the said Church, 

John Skinner, Bishop. 

William Abernethy Drummond, Bishop. 

John Str^chan, Bishop. 



The following is taken from the original and offi- 
cially attested list, given to Bishop Seabury himself, 
of the Consecration and succession of Bishops so far as 
his own Consecration is concerned: and has been by 
me personally compared with that original, now in 
the possession of the Reverend William Jones Sea- 
bury, D. D., of New York, 

[Signed] George Shea. 

September 12, 1892. 

BISHOP HICKE'S SUCCESSION DEDUCED : 

1693. Feb. 23. D"" George Hickes was consecrated 
Suffragan of Thetford, in the Bishop of Peter- 
borough's Chapel in the Parish of Enfield, by D'' 
William Loyd, B'p of Norwich, D"" Francis Tur- 
ner, B'p of Ely, and D' Thomas White B'p of 
Peterborough.^ 

1675. July 4. D"" William Loyd was consecrated 
B'p of Landaff, in Lambeth Chapel by D'' 
Gilbert Sheldon A. Bp of Canterbury, D'" Richard 
Stearn A. B'p of York & D^ Peter Gunning B'p 
of Ely. He was translated to Peterborough May 
17. 1679, & thence to Norwich July 4, 1685. 

1683. Aug. 27. D"" Francis Turner was consecrated 
B'p of Rochester in Lambeth Chapel, by D'' Wil- 
liam Sancroft A. B'p of Canterbury, D'' Henry 
Compton B'p of London, D' Nathanael Crew 
B'p of Durham, D^ Seth Ward B'p of Sarum, & 

1 Dr Loyd, Dr Turner and Dr White were three of the English 
Bishops who were deprived at the Revolution, by the civic power, for 
not swearing allegiance to William the Third. They were also three of 
the seven Bishops who had been sent to the Tower, by James the Second, 
for refusing to order an illegal proclamation to be read in their dio- 
ceses. 



92 Cl^e ^cotiS OBfiSl^opsf 

D"^ William Loyd B'p of Peterborough. He was 
translated to Ely, Aug. 23. 1684. 
1685. July 25. D"" Thomas White was consecrated 
B'p of Peterborough in Lambeth Chapel by 
A. B'p Sancroft, B'p Compton of London, B'p 
Turner of Ely, D^ William Loyd, B'p of S^ 
Asaph, D^ John Lake B'p of Chichester, D'^ Thomas 
Sprat B'p of Dunkeld in Scotland. 

B'P LOYD OF NORWICH'S CONSECRATORS : 

1660. Oct. 28. D"^ Sheldon was consecrated B'p 
of London in K. Henry the 7^^' Chapel at West- 
minster, by B'pps & D"' Brian Duppa of Win- 
chester, Accepted Trewen of York, Matthew Wren 
of Ely, John Warner of Rochester, & Henry 
King of Chichester, by Commission from A. B'p 
Juxon of Canterbury, whom he succeeded & 
was confirmed in that See in Lambeth Chapel 
Aug. 31. 1663. 

1660. Dec. 2. In the same Chapel, & by a like 
Commission was consecrated D' Richard Stearn 
to the See of Carlisle, by B'p Sheldon of London, 
B'p Duppa of Winchester, D'' Humphrey Hench- 
man B'p of Salisbury, and D'' Robert Sanderson 
B'p of Lincoln. He was translated to York, June 
10. 1664. 

1669. Mar. 6. D"" Peter Gunning was consecrated 
B'p of Chichester by A. Bps Sheldon & Stearn, 
B'p Henchman of London, D"" George Morley of 
Winchester, Benjamin Lamy of Ely, Seth Ward 
of Sarum, John Dolbin of Rochester & Anthony 
Sparrow of Exeter B'pps. He was translated to 
Ely, Mar. 4. 1675. 



Cj^e ^cot0 XijSljopiS 93 



ARCH. BT SHELDON'S CONSECRATORS. 

1638. May 4. D'' Brian Duppa was promoted to 
the See of Chichester, but the Consecrators Names, 
nor Time, nor Place of his Consecration have not 
been found. In 1641 he was translated to Salis- 
bury, & Ocf 4. 1660 to Winchester. 

1641. Dec'' 19. D"^ Henry King was consecrated 
B'p of Chichester, by whom, or where has not been 
found. 

1644. April . D"" Accepted Trewen was conse- 
crated Bp of Litchfield & Coventry in Magdalene 
College Chapel, by D"" John Williams A. B'p of 
York, D''^ Walter Curl of Winchester, Robert 
Skinner of Oxford, Brian Duppa of Salisbury, & 
John Towers of Peterborough Bishops. He was 
confirmed A. Bp of York Oct'r 4. 1660. 

1634. March 8. D'' Matthew Wren was conse- 
crated Bp of Hereford in Lambeth Chapel by 
A. B'p Laud, D'^ Richard Neil A. B'p of York, D"^ 
Walter Curl of Winchester, D'' Francis White of 
Ely, D^ Joseph Hall of Exeter & D^ William 
Murray of Landaff B'ps. He was translated to 
Norwich Dec'r 1635, thence to Ely Apr. 24. 1638. 

1^37- J^-n. 14. D'' John Warner was consecrated 
Bp of Rochester in Lambeth Chapel by A. Bp 
Laud, D'' William Juxon Bp of London, D'" Wal- 
ter Curl Bp of Winchester, D'' John Bancroft Bp 
of Oxford, and William Roberts B'p of Bangor. 



^ 



94 Cj^e ^cot0 "Bi^^op^ 



B'P STEARN'S CONSECRATORS, 

Of A. Bp Sheldon & Bp Duppa already: 
1660. Ocf 28. D^ Henchman was consecrated Bp 
of Salisbury, & D'' Sanderson Bp of Lincoln, at 
the same Time & Place, & by the same Persons 
with Bp Sheldon. D'' Henchman was translated 
to London Sept'' 15. 1663. 

BP GUNNING'S CONSECRATORS, 

Of Bps Sheldon, Stearn, & Henchman already: 
1660. Oct'' 28. D' George Morley was consecrated 

Bp of Worcester with Bp Sheldon &c as above. 

He was translated to Winchester May 4. 1662. 
1660. Dec. 2. D' Benjamin Lany was consecrated 

Bp of Peterborough with Bp Stearn as above. 

He was translated to Lincoln Apr. 2. 1663. and 

from thence to Ely, June 12. 1667. 

1666. July I. D'^ John Dolben was consecrated in 
Lambeth Chapel by A. Bps Sheldon & Stearn, 
Bpps Henchman of London, Morley of Win- 
chester, Lany of Lincoln, & John Halket Bp of 
Litchfield & Coventry. 

1667. Nov'' 3. D' Anthony Sparrow was conse- 
crated at Lambeth by A. Bp Sheldon, Bpps Mor- 
ley of Winchester, & Lany of Ely, D"" William 
Nicolson Bp of Glocester, D'' Seth Ward Bp of 
Salisbury, D'" Robert Morgan Bp of Bangor, & 
D'' W^illiam Fuller Bp of Lincoln. 

Arthur Petrie, Clerk.^ 

1 One of the consecrators of Samuel Seabury, Nov. 14, 1785. 



N. B. Bishop Hickes Consecration is deduced as 
goes before^ on account of his being concerned in the 
Consecration of the Scottish Bishops according to the 
following List : 

List of Consecrations in Scotland, with the 
TRUE Dates, & Consecrators Names, as far 

AS THE PRESENT BiSHOPS ARE CONCERNED. 

1705. Jan. 25. M"^ John Sage, formerly one of 
the Ministers of Glasgow, and M'' John Fullarton, 
formerly Minister of Paisley, were consecrated at 
Edinburgh, by John Paterson. A. Bp of Glasgow, 
Alexander Rose Bp of Edinburgh, & Robert 
Douglas Bp of Dunblane.^ 

1709. April 28. M"" John Falconar, Minister at 
Cairnbee, & M"" Henry Chrystie Minister at 
Kinross, were consecrated at Dundee, by Bp Rose 
of Edin^ Bp Douglas of Dunblane, and Bp Sage. 

1711. Aug. 25. The Honourable Archibald Camp- 
bel was consecrated at Dundee by Bp Rose of 
Edin"* Bishop Douglas of Dunblane, & Bp Fal- 
conar. 

1 71 2. Febr. 24. M"" James Gadderar formerly 
Minister at Kilmaurs was consecrated at London, 
by Bp Hickes, Bp Falconar, & Bp Campbel. 

1718. Oct. 22. M'' Arthur Millar formerly Min- 
ister at Inveresk, and M'' William Irvine, formerly 
Minister at Kirkmichael in Carriet, were conse- 
crated at Edin'* by Bp Rose of Ed', Bpps Fullarton 
& Falconar. 

1 Archbishop Paterson, Bishop Rose and Bishop Douglas, were 
deprived at the Revolution, by the civil power, for, also, not swearing- 
allegiance to William the Third. 



96 €]^e ^cotgi OBfiSl^opiS 

AFTER THE BISHOP OF EDIN^'s DEATH : 

1722. Oct. 17. M'' Andrew Cant, formerly one of 
the Ministers of Ed" & M' David Freebairn 
formerly Minister at Dunning, were consecrated 
at Edin' by Bp Fullarton, Bp Millar, & Bp Irvine. 

1727. June 4. D'' Thomas Rattray of Craighall 
was consecrated at Edin'' by Bp Gadderar, Bp 
Millar, & Bp Cant. 

1727. June 18. M^ William Dunbar Minister at 
Cruden, & M' Robert Keith Presbyter in Edin' 
were consecrated at Edinburgh, by Bp Gadderar, 
Bp Millar, & Bp Rattray. 

1735. June 24. M'' Robert White Presbyter at 
Cupar, was consecrated at Carsebank near Forfar, 
by Bp Rattray, Bp Dunbar, and Bp Keith. 

1 74 1. Sept. 10. M"" William Falconar Presbyter at 
Forress was consecrated at Alloa in Clacmannan 
Shire, by Bp Rattray, Bp Keith & Bp White. 

1742. Oct. 4. M"" James Rait Presbyter at Dun- 
dee, was consecrated at Edinburgh, by Bp Rat- 
tray, Bp Keith, & Bp White. 

1743. Aug. 19. M' John Alexander Presbyter at 
Alloa in Clacmannanshire, was consecrated at 
Edinburgh, by Bp Keith, Bp White, Bp Falconar 
& Bp Raitt. 

1747. July 17. M"" Andrew Gerard Presbyter in 
Aberdeen, was consecrated at Cupar in Fife, by 
Bp White, Bp Falconar, Bp Rait & Bp Alexan- 
der. 

1759. Nov'r. I. M'' Henry Edgar was consecrated 
at the same Place, & by the same Bishops as 
Coadjutor to Bp White then Primus. 



Cl^e ^COtjS 'B(!5l^Op0 97 

1762. June 24. M"" Robert Forbes was consecrated 
at Forfar by Bpps Falconar Primus, Alexander, & 
Gerard. 

1768. Sept. 21. M' Robert Kilgour Presbyter at 
Peterhead was consecrated Bishop of Aberdeen 
at Cupar in Fife, by Bp Falconar Primus, Bp 
Rait, and Bp Alexander. 

1774. Aug. 24. M'' Charles Rose Presbyter at 
Down was consecrated Bishop of Dunblane, at 
Forfar by Bp Falconar Primus, Bp Rait Bp 
Forbes. 

1776. June 27. M' Arthur Petrie, Presbyter at 
Meiklefolla was consecrated Bishop Co-adjutor, at 
Dundee, by Bp Falconar Primus, Bp Rait, Bp 
Kilgour, & Bp Rose. And appointed Bishop of 
Ross & Caithness July 8. 1777. 

1778. Aug. 13. M'" George Innes Presbyter in 
Aberdeen was consecrated Bishop of Brechen at 
Alloa, by Bp Falconar Primus, Bp Rose & Bp 
Petrie. 

1782. Sept. 25. M"" John Skinner Presbyter in 
Aberdeen, was consecrated Bishop Co-adjutor, at 
Luthermuir in the Diocese of Brechen, by Bp 
Kilgour Primus, Bp Rose, & Bp Petrie. 
That this is a just List of the Consecrations of 

the Bishops in Scotland since the Year Oite Thousand 

six hundred & eighty-eight, so far as the order of 

Consecration is concerned, is attested by 

Arthur Petrie, 
Clerk to the Synod of Bishops.^ 

1 And then Bishop of Ross and Caithness. 



98 Cl^e ^cotis OBfgj^op? 

1784. Nov, 14. Dr, Samuel Seabury, Presbyter, 
from the State of Connecticut, in America, was 
consecrated Bishop, at Aberdeen, by Bishop Kilgour, 
Primus, Bishop Petrie and Bishop Skinner, The 
deed of consecration is as follows : 



IN DEI NOMINE. Amen. 
Omnibus ubique Catholicis per Presentes pateat, 

NOS, Robertum Kilgour, miseratione divina, Epis- 
copum Aberdonien — Arthurum Petrie, Episcopum 
Rossen et Moravien — et Joannem Skinner, Epis- 
copum Coadjutorem ; Mysteria Sacra Domini nostri 
Jesu Christi in Oratorio supradicti Joannis Skinner 
apud Aberdoniam celebrantes, Divini Numinis Prae- 
sidio fretos (presentibus tam e Clero quam e Populo 
testibus idoneis) Samuelem Seabury, Doctorem Di- 
vinitatis, sacro Presbyteratus ordine jam decoratum 
ac nobis prae Vitae integritate, Morum probitate et 
Orthodoxia, commendatum, et ad docendum et re- 
gendum aptum et idonium, ad sacrum et sublimem 
Episcopatus Ordinem promovisse, et rite ac canonice, 
secundum Morem et Ritus Ecclesiae Scoticanae, con- 
secrasse. Die Novembris decimo quarto, Anno ^rae 
Christianae Millesimo Septingentisimo Octagesimo 

Quarto. 

In cujus Rei Testimonium, Instrumento huic 

(chirographis nostris prius munito) Sigilla 

nostra apponi mandavimus. 

RoBERTus Kilgour, Episcopus, et Primus. (L. S.) 

Arthurus Petrie, Episcopus. (L. S.) 

Joannes Skinner, Episcopus. (L. S.) 



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